After we took some time off for Christmas Break, with even some of us returning back to our countries for the holidays… we are back!

Team Infection is currently working in a commercial need related with patient behavior and making healthcare even more efficient. As you can imagine, changing people’s behavior can be extremely difficult, especially if it requires a change of routines or habits. Taking that into mind, we are trying to turn it around somehow, making use of those pre-existing behaviors and information, to actually adapt the system to the patient, and not the other way around.

We are also preparing the Clinical Report that we will deliver to the Infectious Diseases Clinic at Danderyds Sjukhus, in which we are suggesting solutions that aim towards real change.

Our master students will be visiting next week the wards, so we are preparing for them an agenda for their kick-off day, where we will show them the clinic, meet the staff and give them guidelines about how to behave at the hospital.

Finally, to end the week, we had a Brainstorming workshop with Anna Thies, Clinical Innovation Fellow:

Short calm lecture before the Brainstorm

We had the opportunity to play around with different brainstorming tools, like posting ideas individually or building ideas based on others. It definitely was a fitting tool at this moment, when we are working so thoughtfully with our need! Thank you Anna!

(You can always reach us by sending an e-mail to: teaminfection@clinicalinnovation.se)

José (Team Infection)

Finally we have reached our objective for this week: we have decided which need we are going to work with.

Value Proposition Canvas on one of the needs, one of the multiple tools that helped us discard possible candidates

Now we are going to work deeply with this need, iterating in function of how the on-going process reveals new information, as part of the Biodesign process. Our first step is to define the assumptions we have made about our need, and rank them by importance and priority. There are (allegedly) a big number of unknown unknowns.

Ranked this assumptions, it is important to understand which ones we can actually tackle in a timely way, as Christmas will be a difficult time for interviews and in-field probing.

We are also drafting what will become our Clinical Report, which will be delivered to the Infectious Diseases Clinic, with suggestions and assessments for the betterment of the Clinic.

As part of the Clinical Innovation Fellowships we are as well compiling a list of 20 commercial needs that will be added to the Fellowship’s Need Database, which will help future fellows if they ever need to dig into something we stumbled upon before.

Last but not least, we had the privilege to get some time from one of the Clinical Innovation Fellowships success stories, Pilloxa. We visited their office and had a very enjoyable afterwork, where we learned about some of the challenges we will have to tackle in the near future, if we pursue the testing life of the start-up creator. Thank you Per & Francesco!

(You can always reach us by sending an e-mail to: teaminfection@clinicalinnovation.se)

José (Team Infection)

So we did it! We went through our 2nd Business Mentor Meeting (along with Team O) with our four needs and had the feedback from our mentors, treating the strengths and weaknesses of each need, asking the why’s? and analyzing their potential.

There is still a lot of work to do with these four needs, as our goal now is to narrow them down to one. We have set to ourselves a deadline for having a clear defined need to work with, as we believe that setting that goal will encourage us to not to linger too much out of FOMO (fear of missing out… a possible good need).

Memories from our second Business Mentor Meeting

It is part of the Biodesign process to iterate the needs in function of how the on-going process reveals new information, perspectives and showstoppers. It is still early to fall in love for one need, so we have to keep an analytical approach and fresh eyes as long as we can (without forgetting the important part that plays the gut feeling!)

As a celebration for achieving this ‘down to four needs’ goal we met Clinical Innovation Fellows which went through previous editions of CIF. We had very interesting discussions and it was a great pleasure for us to meet them as well. We’re looking forward to the next meeting!

(You can always reach us by sending an e-mail to: teaminfection@clinicalinnovation.se)

José (Team Infection)

Good news everyone! Now Team Infection is officially down to four needs in our commercial oriented ones.

This means that we will able to focus our efforts on these in order to find the chosen one, the need that we will work to solve. Someone said in Barcelona “for the rest of our lives”. Could be. We hope it doesn’t take that long!

We’ve had a very occupied week, working on these needs as well as having different meetings with some of the entities that will help us to successfully develop a commercial solution, and a business model that homes it.

On Monday we met KTH Innovation, which supports the commercialization of ideas and research results from entities and individuals related to KTH. Mainly (but not only) focused on commercialization of new technology and the early stages of the development and verification of an idea, KTH Innovation can be really a big support for us.

We also visited STING, at Kista, incubator and accelerator of ideas and start-ups. From qualified coaching in business development, a business angel network, a venture capital fund and business contacts and experts, STING is another big player in our journey. We are applying and hoping to be selected for STING Test Drive in Health, where we would be able to work on our business model, based on Business Model Canvas.

Tuesday and Friday we visited RISE (Research Institutes of Sweden) and SICS Swedish ICT. Both identified as a network of research and technology organisations (RTOs), wholly or partly owned by the Swedish state, gave us fresh ideas about the state of art of the health market, trends and technology.

At SICS Swedish ICT, discussing about challenges and pilot projects

It is worth mentioning that we are also juggling with our schedule to be able to interview students. They will be carrying out the Master’s Thesis we are going to be orchestrating for the betterment of the Infectious Diseases Clinic at Danderyds Sjukhus.

That and working towards our second Business Mentor Meeting, which will take place next Wednesday! Keep tuned for more good news next week!

(You can always reach us by sending an e-mail to: teaminfection@clinicalinnovation.se)

José (Team Infection)

News from Team Infection! We are now (mainly) located in our CTMH office at Fleminsberg, sharing space with the CTMH team, all being hosted at the STH (Skolan för teknik och hälsa) building.

STH Building at KTH Flemingsberg  (Source)

We had to make some arrangements to adapt it to our needs: shared spaces, setting a projector, whiteboards and flipcharts… Tools that we deem necesary for our creative (and structural!) way of working.

Our new office, skeleton included

Speaking about needs, in order to explore some of the eight we are now working with (and trying to narrow down to four), we payed a visit to the showrooms at Nya Karolinska, where we could take a look at how patient centered care and trends toward single rooms are influencing the building of the hospitals of the (near) future.

Single patient room with individual bathroom at Nya Karolinska

Last but not least, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect with us moving into KTH Fleminsberg, as last Thursday evening we had a delightful dinner (and Glögg) at the STH Christmas Party in Långholmens Wärdshus, formerly Sweden’s biggest prison, where we had the opportunity to meet our  STH neighbors and colleagues.

That DEFINITELY was a tasty dinner!

(You can always reach us by sending an e-mail to: teaminfection@clinicalinnovation.se)

José (Team Infection)

Just as the title says, it is time for us to bring the number of selected needs down. A lot.

From our almost 300 hundred needs we have maimed them to mere eight. The only way to achieve this Thermopylaic scenario was making use of different tools that would help us select the best needs in the shortest period of time.

For that, we first went through all of them, one by one, selecting those that fitted in different predefined criteria. After this first selection, we decreased the number down to almost fifty.

The next step was to cluster each of these needs into the right set. Clustering consists in grouping each need in such a way that the needs that are located in each group (or cluster) are more similar to each other than to those located in other clusters. This way we were able to have an overview of how needs are distributed, and which clusters we think are more interesting for a commercial development.

The art of clustering

Having the right clusters and bearing into mind speed validations and different parameters we achieved to finally narrow it down to eight (our beloved hateful eight). These are the needs in which we will work through, at least until the next (self-imposed) deadline, November 24th. Here, after working each of us in two different ones, we will do some more need filtering and narrow it down to four.

As you can see, it also works for individual needs: how observations fit to different clusters in a need definition?

These four needs will (finally) be the ones that we will present at the Second Business Mentor Meeting, where we will expose what are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, desirability, feasibility and viability of each need. The group will aid us in our quest for the NEED, the one that we will work with, being a commercial development our goal.

(And is always good to have 3 more aces in your sleeve just in case that one NEED turns to be a ‘gold shield’: something that looks appealing, but not good for what it is intended).

(You can always reach us by sending an e-mail to: teaminfection@clinicalinnovation.se)

José (Team Infection)