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06/11/2020

The 2020 edition of the health innovation program d·HEALTH Barcelona comes to an end

dHEALTH2020_8842

06/11/2020

This year, the clinical immersion of fellows in hospitals was adapted due to the pandemic. The students had a virtual stay to identify needs in the framework of COVID-19 pandemic and propose solutions.

Future entrepreneurs in this year's edition of d.HEALTH Barcelona, which started in February, had to stay in three Catalan hospital services, including the Diagnostic Imaging and Nuclear Medicine Service in Vall d'Hebron, but the pandemic interrupted it in mid-March. Faced with this situation, it was decided to continue with the program adapting it to the new context, so the fellows (students of this postgraduate program) worked virtually in multidisciplinary teams to develop a technological solution to a problem related to COVID-19 or to treat an unmet clinical need accentuated by the pandemic. This year's,¡ three teams detected around 1,000 unsolved clinical needs, through a series of interviews with healthcare professionals, patients and other healthcare experts. From there, they analyzed them thoroughly, then filtered and evaluated them and, finally, chose one per team and developed an innovative technological solution. The three resulting projects, currently under development, are: a medical device to prevent diaphragmatic atrophy suffered by patients connected to mechanical breathing in the ICU, a digital device to quickly diagnose cases of posterior circulation stroke, and a digital platform to prevent perinatal depression.The contribution of Vall d'Hebron Hospital during this edition has been focused, on the one hand, in offering its experts to the students of the program in conferences during the phase of detection of needs, as it is the case of participation of Dr. Anton Aubanell, from the Radiology Unit, and Dr. Ricard Ferrer, head of the Intensive Care Unit, who answered questions about COVID-19 online. On the other hand, during the filtering and evaluation phase, experts participated in online tables, such as Dr. Manel Escobar, Clinical Director of the Diagnostic Imaging and Nuclear Medicine Service, Dr. Jordi Andreu, from the Diagnostic Imaging and Nuclear Medicine Service, Dr. Oriol Roca, from the Intensive Care Unit, Raquel Cánovas, Deputy Director of Technology, Eva Aurín, head of the Digital Innovation and Health Unit, Martí Archs, from the Innovation Unit of the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), and Dr. Antonio Roman, Assistant Director of Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, who also participated in a roundtable during the graduation ceremony, which took place online on October 29th. In this sense, Dr. Antonio Roman stated that from Vall d'Hebron University Hospital "we are very pleased that this new edition of d.HEALTH Barcelona program has been carried out in this complex context and of having been able to help fellows with out experts".Design Health Barcelona (d.Health Barcelona) is a postgraduate program to develop future entrepreneurs and innovators in the field of health, promoted by Biocat within its Moebio line of talent development. Vall d'Hebron University Hospital has been collaborating for three years. In the 2019 edition, participants stayed in their Psychiatry Department and, thanks to their clinical immersion, created a project to develop a digital platforms for patients with bipolar disorder.

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