Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare.

 

Describe an innovative idea you have been entertaining. Include what grants you could write and the potential outcomes of the idea. Include how entrepreneurship drives successful healthcare innovation. In this assignment, you can discuss any idea you can imagine but be sure to include the financial implications of implementing the plan.Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare.

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A Child Welfare Wearable Innovation in Healthcare for the Modern Digitally Connected Parent
Innovation and entrepreneurship in healthcare is akin to other entrepreneurship ventures. However, the nature of healthcare makes it unique in that any entrepreneurial attempt in this field must take into consideration the fact that there is an inherent risk attributable to dealing with human life. In orher words, there is more at stake in being an entrepreneur in healthcare than in other sectors (Myler, 2016). Human life is sacred. Therefore, any venture touching on human life can collapse overnight if it gets something wrong and bad publicity follows it. This is true regardless of how vast the healthcare business empire is. As any entrepreneur knows, it takes time to build a brand. Once built, it is also the popularity of the same brand that can prove to be the business' Achille's heel. Being easily recognizable, any adverse publicity makes it easy to isolate.Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare. This paper is about such a risky but potentially profitable innovation. It is about an innovative idea in the field of healthcare that harnesses technology to bring convenience in the palms of parents.
It is undeniable that technology is shaping every facet of our society and homes today. This is also the same case with healthcare. Innovations on technology have had pervasive and far-reaching applications in healthcare from diagnosis to treatment and monitoring. This has enabled healthcare services to not only be more efficient, but also more cost-effective. Because of this, technology has provided an avenue for entrepreneurs to invest in the field of healthcare by harnessing these applications (The George Washington University, 2020). Frankly, the opportunities are immense, considering the need for convenience, consistency, and reliability in healthcare. One of these opportunity areas is in wearable healthcare technology (The George Washington University, 2020). This is where my innovative entrepreneurial idea comes in.Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare.
The Innovative Healthcare Technology
The biggest nightmare of every parent every day is getting a phone call from school informing them that their child is unwell. This news always strikes a parent with a lot of trepidation. To make it possible for a parent to continuously monitor the health of their child, the healthcare innovative idea suggested by this entrepreneurial venture is the development of a wearable wrist gadget that is placed by the parent at home. This wrist gadget will resemble a miniature wrist watch and will only be removable by the parent when the child comes back home. To remove it, the parent will have to enter a unique password on their smartphone. This is because the wrist gadget is synchronized with the parent's smartphone and sends real-time information about the child's health status to the parent's smartphone.Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare. This information that the wrist gadget will be collecting from the child's body and relaying to the parent includes body temperature, pulse rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure. The parent's smartphone will have a specific application developed to receive information from the gadget. It will have tremendous functionality in that it will be able to sound an alarm in the event that there is a critical value from any of the vital signs. For instance, if the temperature of the child is normal, this will be both streamed in real time and recorded in graph form. Also, entering a particular time of the day will give the parent what the child's temperature was at that time. However, if the tempetature rises above normal (a critical value) the parent's smartphone will sound an alarm that can only be reset from the smartphone application that goes with the gadget. This means the parent has to see what the temperature is before being able to reset the alarm. With this functionality, the parent is the one who will be notifying the school authorities that their child is unwell, instead of the other way round. Normally, it is the child who bas to report that they are feeling unwell for them to be taken to the school nurse. By this time, usually, the child has been having abnormal vital signs for a while. This innovation is therefore going to fill an identified gap in child welfare, safety, and protection while at school.Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare.
The End-Users
This healthcare technology will be used by children of school-going age from kindergarten up to age nine. This is from the observation of the fact that it is this age group that is more vulnerable to medical emergencies that result from a delay in reporting abnormalities in body vital signs. Before the development of this idea, a scientific approach was taken in which research was conducted from a random sample of junior schools and parents. The result of the cross-sectional study showed that the problem of preventable medical emergencies in this age group is big. Statistical analysis showed that this problem can be substantially reduced if the abnormalities in vital signs could be identified earlier and action taken.Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare.
The Target Market
The target market for this healthcare innovation is the group of working class parents who are always on the move but who would also like to have control of their children's welfare even when they are at work. For this group of parents, the cost of this gadget is affordable, given that they don't have to buy two gadgets but only one (for the child). For the parent, all they will need to do is to download the application that goes with the gadget's functionality from the Google App store. At an estimated one-off cost of USD 50 and a lifespan of two years, this innovation is cost-effective. Apart from after-sales service, the gadget will be replaced at a reduced cost of USD 35 once it does its lifespan of two years.Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare.
Development and Production
In order to reduce start-up and running costs, my company will partner with one of the already established mobile phone manufacturing companies that already have the infrastructure to mass produce such gadgets. We will enter into an agreement that will see the manufacturer share with us the profits in a predetermined way after deducting production and overhead costs. We will however maintain ownership of the brand and copyright. That said, however, there will still be the matter of initial software development and hardware design. These two will require start-up capital.
A software developer will have to come up with the programming language and coding to form the basis of the functionality of the healthcare technology. These are software engineers who will also have to work closely with an expert who has a medical background. This software will be patented and copyrighted by my company after completion. At the same time, another team will undertake the task of designing the hardware. This they will do with the end-user in mind. These are the children of kindergarten age up to nine years. As stated earlier, the wearable wrist gadgets will be designed in such a way that the child will not be able to remove them. This is both for safety amd security reasons. Because they cannot remove them, the younger children will not be able to accidentally swallow the gadget. Also, as much as the gadget is for monitoring the health of the child, it also inadvertently assists in tracking the child such that the child can still be found if abducted.Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare.
Grants/ Funding
Funding is a crucial consideration in healthcare innovation, as it is in any form of entrepreneurial venture (Grazier & Metzler, 2006). The funding or seed capital for this entrepreneurial venture will come from my savings. This will however not be enough. As such, I will invite an angel investor to partner with me for the practical realisation of this venture. The liberal estimate is that I will require about USD 50,000 to make this a reality. As explained above, this will largely go towards software development and hardware design.
Conclusion
Entrepreneurship is the engine that drives innovation. Healthcare is one of the areas in which entrepreneurship has great potential. However, as one engages in entrepreneurship in healthcare, the fact that it is a high-risk sector should not escape the entrepreneur. This paper suggests one such opportunity areas in healthcare involving a wearable gadget for children that is synchronized with the parents' smartphone. From the discussion above, this is indeed a feasible entrepreneurial idea.Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Healthcare.