Use of an Interdisciplinary Student Medical Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program to Create Affordable Global Health Care Solutions

Abstract

Background. Bench to Bedside is a 7-month-long medical innovation and entrepreneurship program at the University of Utah in which teams comprising students from various disciplines work together to identify health care problems and develop novel technology solutions. Student teams are provided a small prototyping budget, access to device development workshops, prototyping facilities, and expert faculty and industry mentors. Teams then compete for seed funding at the Bench to Bedside competition at the end of the program. In 2014, we created global health–specific resources, mentorship, guidance, and award incentives as a means to drive global health technology development in the program and then studied our impact after 6 years. Methods. We reviewed program data collected continuously between 2011 and 2018 to evaluate the impact of global health incentive initiatives on the development of global health–related technologies. We quantified the number of global health teams based on both team-declared data and objective evaluation of each competing technology. Results: The initiation of global health technology incentives was associated with an annual overall doubling of teams pursuing the development of global health–related technologies from an average of 11.4% to 24.8% ( P = .003). Conclusions. A student medical technology innovation program designed to address global health needs is an effective means of generating new solutions to improve global health care. The use of global health–specific awards and mentors raised awareness of the need for affordable global solutions and incentivized teams to pursue development.