AWARDS: Patient Innovation wins Santa Casa Challenge and is a finalist for the 2018 Red Herring Top 100 Awards

The year of 2018 started out in a great way! The project "Dar a mão" (Give a hand), by Patient Innovation, was the winner of the Santa Casa Challenge, promoted by Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa, in the Social Action/Health category.

“Dar a mão” is a project that consists of designing, printing and giving, for free, 3D printing hands and arms for kids from all over Portugal who need a prosthesis. The Patient Innovation team will identify potential receivers and then work with strategic partners from all over the country in order to reach to more people in a shorter period of time. One of the goals of this project is also to teach the children and their parents to 3D print their own prosthesis, so that they can be independent and produce new gadgets (which will be necessary because of the child’s growth).

The award was delivered on a public ceremony on February 6th 2018.
You can check the project pitch here.

Patient Innovation is also happy to be selected as a finalist for Red Harring's Top 100 Awards, a list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from Asia, Europe and the Americas.

The finalists were selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the months leading up to the announcement, Red Herring reviewed over 1200 companies in the telecommunications, security, cloud, software, hardware, biotech, mobile and other industries that completed their submissions to qualify for the award.

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Patient Innovation to be featured at OECD Forum 2018

Patient Innovation will participate at OECD Forum 2018, May 29-30, Paris. This is an annual multi-stakeholder event, open to the public and bringing in more than 3000 participants. At the Forum policy is debated and ideas are shared between governments, business, trade unions, civil society, academia and media. Confirmed speakers include the French President Emmanuel Macron.
The OECD Forum 2018 “will reflect on what brings us together, moving from diagnosis to action, and shaping solutions to build these much-needed bridges”.

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Patient Innovation at the European Health Parliament

The European Patients’ Forum invited Patient Innovation to participate on a debate about Outcome-based Healthcare at European Health Parliament in Brussels. The activities of the parliamentarians were organized around five thematic committees: Outcomes–based Healthcare Systems, Robotics, AI & Precision Medicine, Antimicrobial Resistance, Health Workforce Planning and European Vaccine Initiative. The committee on Outcome-based Healthcare focused on questions such as: how to set up real outcomes–based health systems in Europe and what is the role of the EU in potential tools and solution’s creation and best practice dissemination.

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Ideas for solutions brought to reality at TecStorm

Patient Innovation was partner of TecStorm, by JUNITEC - Júnior Empresas do Instituto Superior Técnico, a hackathon that took place at Pavilhão do Conhecimento - Centro Ciência Viva, Lisbon, from March 2nd to March 4th. Patient Innovation asked their community members for ideas of solutions that could meet some daily needs felt by patients and caregivers, for the hackathon's social category. Some of these ideas were brought to reality by engineering students at TecStorm.

Here are the project winners in the social category:

• 1st place – Hack_a_Game (this team built a system that prevents gas leaks, notifying the people that live in the house and preventing the gas to spread all over the house);

• 2nd place – Age-O-Tronics (this team developed a gadget that is put in the diaper and estimates the percentage regarding the volume of the content);

• 3rd place – The Wise MOSFETs (this team created a system that detects P10, CO and CO2, among other substances through a smart valve that cuts the gas flow and a smart ventilation system in one or more rooms in the house).

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Patient Innovation at the Portugal eHealth Summit

Patient Innovation was invited to present the project at the Portugal eHealth Summit, on March 21st. This event was promoted by the Portuguese Ministry of Health, through SPMS (Serviços Partilhados do Ministério da Saúde).

Salomé Azevedo presented Patient Innovation and two Patient Innovation community members presented their story and innovations: Hugo Silva, who developed CubiKG, a device to monitor his arrhythmic heart, and João Medeiros, a multiple sclerosis patient who is creating BladdeRunner, an app to monitor his bladder activity.

The three presentations were followed by a debate which also had the presence of Sofia Couto da Rocha and Miguel Amaral Nunes, from the Patient Innovation medical team. The panel discussed how the health care professionals are aware of innovative solutions created by patients and caregivers, what are the obstacles these innovators face while developing innovations, etc.

This was the second edition of Portugal eHealth Summit. Patient Innovation had also participated at the first edition which had 10.000 participants and is the largest event on the country that focused on digital change in Health.

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Patient Innovation at the
Crowdsourcing Week Artic/Europe & "Talk a Bit"

Patient Innovation was featured in several other major events and conferences, including the Crowdsourcing WeekArtic/Europe 2018, which was held in Lulea and Voullerim, Sweden (March 20-24th 2018) and at "Talk a Bit”, held in Porto, Portugal (January 20th 2018).

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Patient Innovation European Tour

Our Patient Innovation European tour keeps on going and is almost over!

The “Beyond the lab: The DIY science revolution”, is an exhibition about do it yourself innovations that features Patient Innovation and has seven of our innovations on display.

The exhibition opened in Bonn (Germany), in 2016, and visited 29 European countries, including our hometown, Lisbon, Portugal. The exhibition has already received over 1 million visitors.

The exhibition is now open at Centrum Experyment, Gdynia, Poland, until June 19th 2018. The last destination of this exhibition is Lugano, Switzerland, at Università della Svizzera Italiana.

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Happy 4th anniversary Patient Innovation!

It’s been four years since Patient Innovation was launched.

Here's some facts regarding these past four years:

• 850 medically screened innovations from over 60 countries,
• 1600 submissions,
• 60000 users in 5 continents,
• 0,5 million page views,
• 3 editions of the Patient Innovation Awards,
• a presence at the Web Summit,
• Santa Casa Challenge Winner,
• AACSB's Entrepreneurship Spotlight Challenge Honoree,
• named "Nonprofit startup of the Year",
• an honorable mention by the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Kin-moon,
• participation in the "Beyond the Lab: The DIY Science Revolution" (over 1 million visitors),
• "most voted project from the crowd" (about 26.000 votes), semifinalist at Harvard Heath Innovation Challenge,
• featured at the World Government Summit Dubai ...

... and thousands of lives touched.

Patient Innovation is a nonprofit association resulting from a spinoff research process developed at the Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, Nova Medical School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Carnegie Mellon University.