I recently signed on as an advisor to a group of George Washington University students who are organizing a medical and assistive device hackathon on March 24-25, 2018, in downtown DC. Check it out if you live nearby!
In pulling together resources for them, I found the memo I sent to senior leaders across the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) describing how hardware innovation is transforming people’s lives, how HHS can play a role, and how the Invent Health Initiative supported then-Secretary Sylvia Burwell’s Innovation Agenda.
January 7th, 2016
Susannah Fox, CTO, HHS
Supporting the Secretary’s Innovation Agenda – the Invent Health Initiative
Through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) IDEA Lab’s work on open innovation, the Department has made meaningful progress in opening new channels of action to help both HHS employees and U.S. citizens contribute toward the greater good. The purpose of this memo is to highlight a new effort we are undertaking to support a burgeoning movement of entrepreneurial individuals who are creating breakthrough medical and assistive devices through unconventional means. Using our open government strategies, HHS can facilitate progress in the development of physical objects to improve health and anticipate advances in manufacturing that will affect our regulatory and service-delivery work in the future. Invent Health supports the Secretary’s innovation agenda and our strategic goal to advance scientific knowledge and innovation by connecting HHS with emerging networks of communities focused on turning ideas into health and service products.
Our goal is to enhance the opportunities for innovators and entrepreneurs, through our government programs, to engage in a community of problem solvers organizing around the “hardware” of health and human services. Here, I share with you a few perspectives and lay out steps for the next year to help catalyze this national movement of invention for health.
Background on the Inventor Movement
There are an increasing number of small-scale inventors creating solutions to home and clinical care challenges that enable people to live more independently, in better health, and with greater dignity. These innovators bring unique experiences and skills in user-centric design, engineering, materials science, and computer programming and couple them with an equally unique understanding of problems that impact the quality of our lives. For example, in the home environment, people affected with movement disorders are able to feed themselves with utensils designed to counteract hand tremors. In the clinical setting, new ways to keep catheter and intravenous lines clean and in place have been invented by parents and nurses who recognized a need for improvement. Prosthetics are being co-designed with the people who will use them and, in some cases, get 3-D printed according to their specifications.
We can play a vital role in empowering communities of innovators, both inside and outside government. For example, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) recently promoted a challenge competition in food safety that yielded five hardware innovations aimed at rapid detection of Salmonella. The Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) sponsored a challenge competition to determine the location and status of durable medical equipment in order to aid first responders who need to prioritize people who have lost electricity during natural disasters. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a team created the 3D Print Exchange to support networks of inventors who are creating tools for biomedical research and establishing a platform for on-demand, low-cost prosthetics and assistive devices. We know there are many more examples.
Challenges and Opportunities for HHS
There are leading indicators that this nascent movement of individual inventors, aided by information technology and open innovation approaches, is broadening its impact in the marketplace. However, there is a growing sense that government, as a platform, can play a key role in helping to overcome barriers and accelerate the inventor movement.
In our analysis of the current landscape and marketplace of ideas, we’ve identified some key areas where some modest input can yield higher impact results. Often, we find that innovators lack access to:
- advanced technology tools that would allow them to prototype their ideas;
- industrial tools that would allow them to manufacture and distribute their inventions at scale;
- information about high priority issues – essentially, where they should aim next;
- information that would allow them to get market approval for their devices in regulated areas of health and human services; and
- platforms to engage the marketplace to socialize their ideas and prototypes, and determine whether they are of commercial value.
What can HHS do to address these challenges and help create new opportunities for innovation? Here are a few initial areas of exploration:
- entrepreneur access to and awareness of tools like 3D printing, fabrication facilities, maker spaces like TechShop, and government-sponsored labs;
- marketplace entry points through start-up funding through accelerators such as Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs and prize competitions (like the ones made possible by the America COMPETES Act);
- access to information and resources,, especially in areas of high need in both the community and the clinical setting, across all the populations HHS serves; and
- access to publishing/sharing tools that would allow people to post pictures, diagrams, videos, etc. of their ideas and inventions (and which would allow government to share consumer-friendly information about regulatory pathways).
Moving forward, we are eager to hear from HHS colleagues as well as the public on other barriers and ideas to accelerate pathways for American ingenuity to achieve improvements in our most challenging problems areas.
How HHS can Engage in a Community Dialogue
We believe that what is needed most now is a series of structured discussions around several themes regarding where government can help accelerate progress in innovations in high priority areas for HHS. Our first steps are to hold a HHS town hall on January 28, hold a series of regional engagements with stakeholders, and establish a listening and connecting post at HHS through our use of the web and social media. You can follow our work and engage in it through several channels at http://www.hhs.gov/idealab/what-we-do/invent-health/. These are the early days of this form of American innovation, and I look forward to hearing from you about ideas on how we can leverage this trend to catalyze further innovation.
Here are the events we helped create as part of the Invent Health Initiative:
Making Health: An Interactive Celebration of How Tinkering, Technology, and Design Tools are Transforming Healthcare
Georgetown University Leavey Center, Washington. D.C.
Thursday, June 23, 2016
MedStar Health, the HHS IDEA Lab, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) hosted an interactive event—part of the White House National Week of Making—where attendees had the opportunity to experience the hardware innovations and design tools——that have led to the maker movement in health care, allowing people to live more independently, in better health, and with greater dignity.
One example highlighted in this initiative spotlights an inventor who created—and tested with the support of a grant from the National Institutes of Health—an assistive device that counteracts hand tremors, allowing people living with conditions such as Parkinsons to feed themselves.
For a recap of the event, which was free to the public, visit maker.medstarhealth.org.
This event was curated by Sarah Ingersoll and her team @ the MedStar Institute for Innovation
Making Health Symposium: Inspiring Innovative Solutions for Research and Clinical Care
Masur Auditorium, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center
Monday, June 20, 2016
As part of The National Week of Making (June 17-23, 2016), the NIH hosted a symposium entitled, “Making Health: Inspiring Innovative Solutions for Research and Clinical Care.” The symposium kicked-off with keynote remarks from Susannah Fox, Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who presented on the impact the Maker Movement has had on the democratization of a new class of technologies like 3D printing, and how everyone—researchers, clinicians, and patients alike—can improve their health, and the health of others, through Making and innovation. NIH staff involved in hardware innovation offered short presentations and demonstrations which was followed by a panel discussion.
For a summary of the event, check out:
This event was curated by Meghan Coakley and her team @ the NIH 3D Print Exchange
Space Matters in Health: Defining the Future of Healthcare Environments
University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
HHS, NASA, and the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, TX, convened a symposium in April with a goal of exploring the common principles and problems of innovating within the resource constraints that are common in space and in health care settings. We learned many things, namely, that we all shared the same mission—to sustain human life in extreme environments (the outer banks of space, in the throws of a hurricane, or in a developing country). Read more about what we learned in these two blog posts from HHS Chief Technology Officer, Susannah Fox:
This event was curated by Yasmine Kloth and Malini Sekhar @ the HHS IDEA Lab
Town Hall: Invent Health
Hubert H. Humphrey Building, Washington, D.C.
Thursday, January 28, 2016
We kicked off our Invent Health Initiative at the end of January with a Town Hall that brought together an all-star line up of inventors, federal employees and sage wizards hosted by HHS Chief Technology Officer Susannah Fox to talk about this growing movement of individual inventors and problem solvers who are creating tools, devices, and other physical solutions to home and clinical care challenges. Check out the agenda, the lineup, and videos from the event (we’re slowly adding them) here.
This event was curated by Malini Sekhar and Kate Appel @ the HHS IDEA Lab
Additional Past Events
HHS Chief Technology Officer Susannah Fox has also spoken about the Invent Health Initiative at the following events:
Stanford Medicine X
September 16-18, 2016
Also see: Healthcare needs a jolt of innovation. Here’s how we are approaching it at HHS (HHS IDEA Lab blog)
HxRefactored
April 5-6, 2016
Also see: HHS CTO: Technology in healthcare is a Trojan Horse for culture change (mobihealthnews.com)
Invent It Challenge Launch
January 17, 2016
Also see: Kid Inventors Focus on Health (HHS IDEA Lab Blog)
We #MakeHealth Fest
October 25, 2015
Also see: #Making + #Health = #Innovation (hackernoon.com)
DiabetesMine Innovation Summit
November 20, 2015
Image credit: Design Axioms, opened up, by Juhan Sonin on Flickr
Unfortunately I can’t make it to this event. I have been making feeding tube holders for the past 9 years after my dad Steve “Buckwheat” Rumley who had Bulbar onset ALS had a feeding tube and was losing strength and dexterity. I am a solution person so when Google didn’t find a holder I set out to make an affordable solution. We have sold hundreds of the original Buckwheat and this week we brought to market our 2nd iteration The Buckwheat 2.0 based on feedback and requests from our original models.
Justin, thanks so much for sharing your story — it’s exactly the sort of can-do innovation we hoped to highlight with the Invent Health initiative AND that I hope will come out of the George Hacks event. Congratulations on the success of the Buckwheat feeding tube holder!