Medical Innovations

Medic realizes technological innovations in medical sciences and health care by bringing smart ideas to the marketplace. These ideas may come from researchers, companies and health professionals. When they are passionately involved to realize their ideas, Medic will be able to support them.

Because every idea needs a specific stimulus, Medic can provide assistance at various stages of the innovation. For example to determine the feasibility of ideas, to build networks with promising partners and to find financial support. Medic is an initiative of Medical Delta and is supported by its knowledge institutes Erasmus Medical Centre, Leiden University Medical Centre and Delft University of Technology.

Digital Operating Room Assistant (DORA)

Researchers from Delft University of Technology came up with an idea after observing various surgical environments in hospitals. There they noticed a large number of sophisticated technical equipments as well as a high frequency of small incidents when using all these instruments. With each incident, valuable operating time was lost. One of the most common mistakes was to forget a surgical instrument. “It would be an huge improvement to automatically check whether a certain instrument is present”, says John van den Dobbelsteen, assistant professor at the department of BioMechanical Engineering. “Within planes you have a variety of sensors that measure the height for instance. These warn the pilot when he flies too low. We wanted to develop just such a digital operating room assistant that warns the doctor if something goes wrong. You simply cannot expect a doctor to monitor every instrument himself.”

Dobbelsteen came to Medic with this idea to prevent incidents by developing a monitoring system that automatically checks the presence, positioning and status of the equipment and informs the personnel within the operation room about irregularities. Medic developed a consortium with eight commercial companies, Delft University of Technology and Leiden University Medical Centre as academic partners. “Not all technology needs to be redesigned by us”, Dobbelsteen explains. 

Medic also assisted in the application for subsidies at the province of South Holland. Which were granted. “I had never even heard of these subsidies”, says the scientist. “With help of this financial support we can now develop our monitoring system to make the process of operations more efficient and more reliable. First there was just a wild plan, but Medic has the knowledge how to transform ideas into finished products. They can also help you to realize your ambition”.