Join us for the 4th annual Pitch Day at the 2023 Surgical Innovation Week!

Five teams consisting of UBC General, Cardiac and ENT Surgery Residents along with UBC Engineers in Scrubs will present solutions to a top secret, real-world innovation challenge. The event features distinguished judges, healthcare leaders, and guests from across North America’s healthcare innovation ecosystem.

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, and UBC Engineers in Scrubs, along with our major sponsor, the Vancouver General Hospital Foundation, support our innovators.

Most of our graduates have pursued advanced innovation training at renowned universities and some have joined healthcare technology companies. The course attracts top surgical residents to the University of British Columbia. Over the next 5 years, we aim to train 200 new Clinician Innovators to address complex issues in Canadian healthcare. Our graduates are empathetic physicians with frontline clinical knowledge that prioritize patients.

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