Partnering to Improve Oral Health in a Home Care Setting

In alignment with The Research Institute’s Strategic Plan and the “Create, Test, Spread” framework of St. Joe’s Innovation Committee, we have achieved success in creating opportunities for learning, ideation, and collaboration across the research and hospital communities. While we have successfully hosted many well-attended workshops and events, The Research Institute leads two key collaboration programs – the Healthcare and Engineering Collaborative and The Clinic @ St Joe’s – both through joint collaboration with McMaster University and St. Joe’s Department of Education and Learning.

The Clinic @ St. Joe’s

The Clinic @ St. Joe’s aims to provide new and seasoned health innovators with the opportunity to further develop and commercialize their ideas, guided by The Clinic’s three priorities: Coaching, Mentorship, and Networking. While originally opened in the Winter of 2020, The Clinic’s programming was hindered by the global pandemic. By officially introducing The Clinic @ St. Joe’s with an agenda for entrepreneurs and innovators, new and developing ideas were formally given the chance to reach their potential. In the Winter of 2023, we were excited to officially launch the first offering of content at The Clinic @ St Joe’s in the form of the Health Innovation Bootcamp, which provides participants with the opportunity to explore their innovative concepts, validate their ideas’ commercial potential through weekly challenges, and embark on their journey toward entrepreneurship.

An example of budding entrepreneurship seen through the Bootcamp was the pitch presentation by Ashvin Moro, a research student working in collaboration with research engineer Monica Malek and under the supervision of Dr. Anthony Adili. Ashvin presented a commercialization plan for his team’s innovative research work on OrthoDB, a comprehensive database of musculoskeletal disorders built from patient-reported and quantitative assessments of patient data.

Healthcare and Engineering Collaborative

In early 2023, The Research Institute, along with St Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton and the W Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology (SEPT) at McMaster University, formed a unique partnership to set a stage for healthcare workers and engineers to share knowledge and pursue new discoveries. Recognizing the imaginative and industrious culture of innovation at St. Joe’s, the collaboration aims to develop new solutions that enhance the experience and outcomes for patients, caregivers, and providers. This Collaborative builds off of student projects started pre-pandemic. It now includes direct support from The Research Institute as a named partner and contains a structured working group and a steering group.

As a way to incite student project ideas for the Healthcare and Engineering Collaborative, we hosted a set of educational and interactive workshops called “Spring Into Innovation,” where healthcare workers, staff, and researchers discussed pain points in clinical care and research, and ideated project concepts. From these sessions we were able to generate nine collaborative projects that will see students, healthcare workers, and researchers work in partnership to create impactful solutions.