Join us for the 5th annual Pitch Day at the 2024 Surgical Innovation Week!

Five teams consisting of UBC General, Cardiac and ENT Surgery Residents along with UBC Engineers in Scrubs and the Care Anywhere Biosensors programs will present solutions to a top secret, real-world innovation challenge. The event features distinguished judges, expert mentors, healthcare leaders, and innovators from around the world.

UBC Surgical Innovation Week is an intensive course that equips surgical residents with the tools to become Clinician Innovators through a unique, multidisciplinary training program in design thinking and entrepreneurship. Our partners, Entrepreneurship@UBC, UBC Engineers in Scrubs and Care Anywhere, along with our major sponsors, Deloitte and the Vancouver General Hospital Foundation, support our innovators. This year, we will have Dr. Iain Hennessey, founder of the world-leading Alder Hey Innovation Hub, as a special guest innovation mentor for all our participants.

Many of our 40+ graduates have pursued advanced innovation training at renowned universities with some advising or starting healthcare technology companies, and the course attracts top surgical residents to the University of British Columbia.

Our graduates are empathetic physicians with frontline clinical knowledge that prioritize patient needs. Over the next 5 years, we aim to train 200 new Clinician Innovators to address complex issues in Canadian healthcare.

We invite you to register for the event here.

Surgical Innovation

The current challenges facing the healthcare system in Canada, which include a growing need for healthcare services as the population ages, inequities in the system due to lack of accessibility to timely care, and a ballooning of healthcare expenditures, will require an immense amount of innovation to produce more cost-efficient processes and systems that can do more with less. Our goal is to use interactive lectures and design sessions to give surgical residents the practical tools and confidence they need to become innovators in healthcare.

We are aiming to scale our existing, week-long UBC Surgical Innovation Week course into recurring, tri-annual workshop series designed to give surgical residents exposure to innovation in healthcare and the tools necessary to enable them to become innovators. The curriculum not only serves as a multidisciplinary innovation training program which culminates in pitch competitions that yield tangible and scalable solutions to real-world surgical problems, but also as a pipeline aimed at producing innovative projects at the intersection of surgery, engineering, business, and healthcare administration. 

It is our hope that this will give residents an understanding of how to be involved in the innovation process in healthcare as clinicians are well positioned to identify key problems in the healthcare system and propose ideas which lead to effective user-centered approaches to solving real-world problems.

 

Goals

Train 200 clinician innovators in 5 years

Evolve the Stanford, USC, and Hopkins design thinking models for the Canadian healthcare context

Make Vancouver the premiere health innovation hub for industry, clinicians, and innovators

Promote innovation supporters and foundations