It is the holidays season. The time of the year when everyone is hopeful and looking ahead with new resolutions and goals. The last month of 2017 was a tale of work for team medicine. The last week helped us pave the ground for an upcoming six months of excitement and innovation.
Matt, Semra and Elhabib discussing final needs.
400 observations, 200 needs and 90 commercial needs was the outcome of the observation phase. We are now at the second phase going through the need selection that will result in the choice of the one and only need that we will continue with for the rest of this process.
Going through needs
This November, busy is definitely the word. Team medicine has just gone through three crazy weeks. The meeting with our business mentors at the beginning of November was valuable. Their feedback on the 10 commercial needs that we presented lead us to area to investigate further. General aspects we should look at both to reformulate our needs and do research on them.
Semra making an argument as we discuss needs
Three of us from CIF (Clinical Innovation Fellowship): Anton and Semra from Team Medicine, and Jenny from Team Rehab, had the honour of traveling to Barcelona and joining the Moebio (Biocat, Barcelona) fellows to participate in their graduation ceremony! Each of the three teams presented their respective projects in a final graduation pitch to a jury, followed by a question period – wow, what an impressive display! We wish you good luck and diplomacy in pursuing the market in present day in your country(ies). There were also several speeches including a keynote speech by Toby Reid (Biocity, UK), some of whose points we summarise below. Following the graduation we participated in a networking mingle and dinner, as well as a knowledge-sharing workshop the next day.
”Get connected and find true validated product market fit and everything else will get a lot easier.” Toby Reid
We weren’t the only lucky fellows to be part of this ceremony, three Bioinnovate (Ireland) fellows made the trip as well! There was a lot of networking and some really great information sharing going on. All this was interspersed with some delicious food (all dining recommendations gathered by food maestro Anton), shopping enjoyed by all, some barefoot beach walking enjoyed by Semra, while Jenny could not get enough of the sun. The constant ’cafe cortados’ kept us all going strong despite our early morning flight.
We learned that even though we’re in different hospitals, in different countries, our experiences are much the same. We learned that the first reason for startups to fail is that there is no market need. We learned to not make it easy for ourselves to prove a need, we need to question and revise it all the time!
We had an inspiring and constructive knowledge sharing session between our three programs. The Irish fellows are also at the beginning of the needs validation phase, as we are, and the now all-knowing Barcelona graduates were able to share there experience on all our needs validation and team building questions! The international knowledge sharing across schools was a great concept that we hope to keep up!
We enjoyed the people, the feedback, the weather, the food, and have gathered energy and ideas to bring home to our teams. We feel inspired and ready for the next phase!
Congratulations again to all the Moebio Biocat Fellows – well done!
Anton, Jenny, and Semra
Application Deadline Extended to December 15, 2017
Team Rehab, after spending the last six weeks observing and interacting with healthcare professionals and patients in the Highly Specialized Pain Rehab Clinic at Danderyds hospital, is giving students the opportunity to work on high-impact clinical needs which were identified during our clinical immersion.
We are looking for students in mathematics/optimization, graphic design, marketing, communication, and psychology.
Är du intresserad av att jobba med verkliga problem som både har stor betydelse och effekt? Vill du tillämpa dina kunskaper för att förbättra processer inom management relaterat till vård? Det här är en chans du inte vill missa.
Have you ever played the game where players form a queue, and the first person on the queue whispers a message to the second person, who whispers to the person next in line. This goes on until the last person get that whispered message and then repeats what she heard. The final message is compared to the original message, giving a moment of both laughter and wonder on how the message got distorted. (Here is an example, as late night show host Jimmy Kimmel with the cast of Avengers played prior to a show). Well, I am asking you through describing the game mechanism rather than giving it a name because we never agreed on one. Telephone, Chinese Whisperers, Grapevine, Russian Scandal or even the Téléphone Arabe (French for Arabic Telephone) are few names (Viskningsleken in Swedish). It just seems that people could not fathom how information could be lost if all spoke the same language. So, the French called it the Arabic Telephone, other nations called it Chinese Whisperers or Russian Scandal as Arabic, Chinese and Russian are presumably hard to understand. Funny enough, if a group of Chinese (respectively Russians) play the same game, speaking Chinese (respectively Russian) they still get the same laughable outcome as Frenchmen playing in French.
Anton pretending to whisper something to Semra
The personal physician to Roman Emperor Claudius documented something I find weirdly funny: standing on a live electric rays fish at the beach as treatment to alleviate pain. No notable protests and campaigns against stepping over fishes were reported, but evidently, the treatment was effective enough for it to be documented for posterity.
I was waiting for a sunny warm day to hit the beach and go fishing in Sweden to try it. However, considering the time of the year, Lisa, one of the physiotherapist at the Highly Specialized Pain Rehabilitation Clinic, had the great idea to make me test the modern Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator (TENS).
Me concentrated on the electrical stimulator.
Once upon a time there were a Lithuanian businesswoman, Akvile, an Italian engineer, Giampaolo, a Canadian/Swedish medical doctor, Jenny, and an industrial designer, Raoul from The Netherlands, who joined their forces few weeks ago and created team Rehab after an intensive boot camp in Lidingö. The week after, the team joined the Highly Specialized Pain Rehabilitation Clinic at Danderyd University Hospital and started the observation phase of the Clinical Innovation Fellowship.
Team Rehab and the Highly Specialized Pain Rehabilitation Clinic are facing one of the greatest challenges: the relief of long lasting pain.
The Clinical Innovation Fellowship team ‘Internal Medicine’ is undergoing its third week at the Hospital of Norrtälje. At the end of the first week, the team had a grasp of the information needed to go through 6 weeks of observation and pave the ground for the next months of work. [You can follow this work by tuning in every week into the [www.clinicalinnovation.se]].
But hold on! You are probably reading this because it was in your news feed, maybe because you are in MedTech community, heard about CIF somewhere or from someone, or maybe because you know Anton, Elhabib, Semra or Matt. To remove all confusion, let us explain once and for all, in the simplest terms (and a lot of acronyms) what is CIF. CIF (Clinical Innovation Fellowships) is a program that is supported by European Institute of Innovation Technology, Health (EIT Health). The program is jointly managed by KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) and KI (Karolinska Institute) combines different disciplines (Business, Design, Engineering and Medicine) to innovate in healthcare. The program consists each year of multidisciplinary teams. Business, Design, Engineering and Medicine work hand in hand, following the bio-design process to innovate in healthcare.
Hi!
Last Sunday we took the early flight to Dublin as José mentioned . We arrived before lunch so we had a 30min walk to the Guinness museum for some lunch and a Guinness tour. We even got a diploma stating we now know how to tap a perfect Guinness(!)
