After teams form around problem areas of interest, students work with clinical and business advisors to hone the team’s guiding problem statement on the basis of clinical need analysis, market analysis and patent literature review. While some project leaders bring problems from personal experience, many use Sling Health’s clinical problem database to identify interesting problem areas and clinical mentors. Throughout the year, the local and national executive boards work with physicians, allied health professionals and external partners such as the American Medical Association (AMA) to identify key clinical problems and collate a vetted clinical problem database. Additionally, many chapters have negotiated agreements with their associated universities so Sling Health teams maintain 100% ownership of their intellectual property. In contrast to comparable programs 5, Sling Health does not offer any credit or payment to students, which results in the self-selection of individuals genuinely interested and motivated by medical innovation and medical business development. Project leaders and the executive boards then form teams around problems on the basis of mutual interests and complementary skills. Each cycle, selected project leaders present interesting problem areas to program applicants. Sling Health leverages this talent pool to bring together students from different schools (for example, medicine, engineering, business and law) that rarely have opportunities to work together in their respective educational programs. Chapters each adapt the overall program framework described below to best fit their local entrepreneurial ecosystem.Īcademic centers are a renewable source of skilled and motivated students training in various disciplines. Operating on a volunteer-run model, Sling Health consists of chapters, each with a local student leadership team that works with a national Sling Health leadership core consisting of students from various chapters, as well as advisory boards consisting of clinicians, academic professors, healthcare leaders and venture capitalists who help shape the overall direction of the organization. Sling Health forms multidisciplinary teams around clinician- and patient-identified problems, then provides an ecosystem including mentorship, training materials, funding and prototyping facilities needed to advance medical device and software development. This program adopted the strengths of several leading biomedical design programs across the country 2, 3, 4 and modified them into an easily accessible, low-cost, scalable model. Sling Health is a student-led, grassroots initiative that brings together multidisciplinary students, physicians and mentors to develop innovative solutions to clinical challenges 1. We highlight the importance of health technology education and innovation in academia, especially as COVID-19 disrupts so much of how we practice medicine. Here we describe the multi-university, chapter-based structure and national impact of Sling Health over its first seven years. Louis as a student-led medical technology incubator to overcome these challenges and enable trainees to go beyond learning the current state of healthcare to instead start advancing management 1. In 2013, Sling Health, formerly known as IDEA Labs, started in St. Furthermore, the experiential, multidisciplinary and fluid nature of medical innovation is not conducive to the faculty-driven, classwork-based structure of traditional academic courses. While there are a plethora of medical problems needing better solutions and trainees eager to engage, the lack of funding, mentorship and experience are considerable barriers to entry for student-innovators. Trainees at universities often have big ideas, motivation and the time needed to improve healthcare in meaningful ways.
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