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Innovation Fellowship Teams Clinicians with Techies

04/13/2015
Published in Insight - April 2015

Got an idea to revolutionize the delivery of health care in America? If you have a concept for a program, product or gadget, the Johns Hopkins Technology Innovation Center may be your new best friend.

A new one-year fellowship has just been announced that aims to help clinical inventors develop and grow a new health care information technology company — without quitting their day jobs. The fellowship, which begins in October, requires fellows to commit 400 hours over 12 months to create a strategy for their product so they can move on to the next stage and incorporate.

“We’re creating this avenue for inventors to succeed and make an impact,” says Paul Nagy, associate professor of radiology and director of the Johns Hopkins Technology Innovation Center. “They want to participate, but they shouldn’t have to give up their clinical practice. That’s where highly entrepreneurial engineering, business and design students can come into play.”

Nagy and Dwight Raum, chief technology officer for the Johns Hopkins Health System and the university, believe it is the ideal time for Johns Hopkins Medicine to become the leader in health care IT innovation. “We have developed more than 40 applications in the past four years that have become innovative clinical IT tools,” says Gorkem Sevinc, the center’s manager.

Fellows will be teamed with top candidates from the Whiting School of Engineering, Carey Business School and Maryland Institute College of Art under the guidance of the center’s staff and will receive mentorship from local health care IT CEOs and entrepreneurs. The goal is to build multidisciplinary leadership teams that can craft an idea, deploy it clinically and then take it to market. Once the value has been demonstrated clinically, the new company is ready for a business accelerator like the DreamIT Health Baltimore program.

The market for health care IT companies has exploded from $1 billion to $5 billion per year in just four years. The new Technology Innovation Center hopes to be a launching pad for new companies in the local Baltimore community.