Revolutionizing Healthcare via Patient Innovation — Empowering Patients, Sharing Solutions, Improving Lives
Pedro OliveiraOur research has shown that patients and their informal caregivers often develop innovative solutions to help them cope with their health condition and these solutions often improve the quality of life of both the patients and their caregivers. If shared these innovations can significantly impact the lives of others living under similar conditions. Building upon these finding, we have established an online platform, www.patient-innovation.com, aimed at facilitating the sharing of solutions developed by patients and caregivers. In 24 months, over 1400 innovations were submitted (and about 700 were “screened” and approved by our medical team) from a community of 50.000 patients/caregivers from the 5 continents. The project has also received the support of several Nobel Laureates and other reputable scientists.
In 2016 Patient Innovation was named Non-profit Startup of the Year and recognized by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for its contribution to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Over Building upon Patient Innovation, we are now creating a new platform to help patients/caregivers to improve technically their solutions and find a set of resources necessary to commercialize them, so more people can benefit from them. The ultimate aim of the is to empower patients and their caregivers to collaborate, co-create and innovate and create an ecosystem to facilitate patient innovation and entrepreneurship. In this talk, I will explain how we build the “largest deal-flow of medtech in Europe” and provide several examples of innovations developed by patients.