IdeaDish

Company Website

www.IdeaDish.org

Phase

: Pilot Testing Idea Phase

Company Description

Hospitals and NGOs in the developed world send containers full of donated medical devices to under-resourced hospitals in the developing world. This generosity is actually a huge source of waste: the WHO estimates that 75% of medical devices in the developing world are unused because they arrive broken or are useless in settings they weren’t designed for. Well-intentioned engineers try to design for this need, but produce impractical solutions. They don’t know that rugged roads cause sensitive equipment to break or that pills are reduced to powder.

IdeaDish is a communication platform that empowers healthcare workers in the developing world to voice needs and give feedback on new device designs. Medical device engineers will finally be able to collaborate with users to develop success-ensured products that will not lie latent or go unused. No longer will devices manufactured for these settings waste space, production materials, shipping and R&D cost, and valuable time.

BUSINESS STRATEGY

IdeaDish will house a community that voices needs, generates ideas, and designs medical devices. We’re the Quirky.com for our space. We’ll partner with manufacturers within the current economic system to sell IP and license the designs we produce while ensuring that the price stays within range for our customers – healthcare workers. We aim to impact the 4 billion people who are served by critically overburdened healthcare workers. The manufacturers will be selling a product with an identified market and an incentive to produce and scale – both impact and profit. The percentage of the sales that IdeaDish receives will fund the R&D of the next device. We’ll measure the change in used/unused medical devices in hospitals and quantify the amount of wasted manufacturing and shipping materials and costs saved by the use of our success-ensured devices. We’ll use IdeaDish to track intervention-specific outcomes and technology-specific metrics based on the device’s intended use.

Team (including key partners)

Garrett & Elizabeth are Biomedical Engineers with experience designing, installing, & repairing medical devices in over 20 countries in the developing world. IdeaDish was a semifinalist for Echoing Green, a MEGA Startup Weekend participant, and is a SEA pitch competition winner.

Discussion

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