Patient Innovation is a website that shares solutions and ideas developed by patients and informal caregivers for managing personal health issues. It is a non-profit and also provides rating tools and options to report and track modified solutions that these individuals develop.
 | |
Type of site | Open database of innovations developed by patients and caregivers |
|---|---|
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Owner | Patient Innovation Association (non-profit) |
| Created by | Pedro Oliveira |
| Revenue | Non-profit |
| URL | patient-innovation |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | 7 February 2014 |
| Current status | Active |
Patient Innovation started as an academic research project aimed to study user innovation[1] by patients and their non-professional caregivers,[2] funded by The Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT),[3] Carnegie-Mellon Portugal Program[4] and Pieter Pribila Foundation.[5] The project was founded by two Portuguese academics and researchers Pedro Oliveira and Helena Canhão.
As one of the project's outcomes, the online platform was launched on February 7, 2014, at an inaugural event in Lisbon, Portugal.[6] The project is supported by a number of distinguished individuals, including Nobel Laureate Sir Richard J. Roberts,[7] Eric von Hippel, Nobel Laureate Aaron Ciechanover, Katherine Strandburg, Robert Langer, Lee Fleming and Keld Laursen – who serve on the Advisory Board.
Patient Innovation is led by Prof. Pedro Oliveira from Copenhagen Business School and Prof. Helena Canhão from the FCM - NOVA Medical School. The project team includes medical doctors from FCM - NOVA Medical School.
Patient Innovation terms of use include the agreement that users do not include the content that promote "self-mutilation, eating disorders or hard drug abuse". To enforce the terms of service, all the submitted solutions go through a screening by the project's medical team, who check whether for submission complies with the terms and services advertised on the Patient Innovation site. Only the validated solutions are posted on the platform. In 36 months, over 850 solutions developed by patients, (non-professional) caregivers or collaborators from over 60 countries were submitted, curated and shared to improve the lives of many other who struggle with different health conditions.
Patient Innovation promotes the annual Patient Innovation Awards for patients, caregivers and collaborators who have developed innovative solutions to cope with the challenges of their health condition, to assist others they care about, or in some cases, to help people they don't even know. The winners of the 1st Patient Innovation Award were announced in February 2015. They are:
The 1st Patient Innovation Award Ceremony was held in Lisbon on July 13, 2015 at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. European Commissioner Carlos Moedas was one of the distinguished guests.[15]
The winners of the 2nd Patient Innovation Award were announced in February 2016. The 2nd Patient Innovation Award Ceremony was held in November 2016 during the WebSummit. They are:[16]
The winners of the 3rd Patient Innovation Award were announced in November 2017 at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. They are:[17]
The team conducts research on the role of patients of chronic diseases, and their caregivers, in creating new solutions to help them cope with their health conditions. Recently they administered a survey over phone to 500 rare disease patients/caregivers with the following objectives: to measure frequency of patient innovation in a population of rare diseases patients; to measure efforts by patients to share their solutions with others; to explore which factors drive patients to come-up with solutions and share them with others. The solutions reported by patients were validated for their novelty by two medical professionals. 40 individuals (8% of sample) reported solutions that they personally find valuable, and that are also evaluated as novel by expert medical evaluators. If anything like this fraction of innovators holds for the overall population of hundreds of millions of people worldwide estimated to be afflicted by rare diseases, patients and their caregivers may be a tremendous potential resource to improve management and care for many who are similarly afflicted.[18][19]
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