The Patient Shark Tank Goes to Harvard Medical School:
A Year Long Co-Design Program

​Amidst the ivy-strewn towers of Harvard Medical School, innovation was brewing. Yet, this was a deviation from the norm in that patients, traditionally known to be on the receiving end of healthcare services were on the other end of the spectrum and actually helping to co-design these innovations.
 
Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care launched the InciteHealth Program to foster innovation. A key distinction between Incite Health and other accelerators was that in partnership with the Health Collaboratory’s Patient Shark Tank, patient and caregiver perspectives were embedded into the year-long curriculum to ensure their needs, barriers, preferences, concerns, and values were well understood. This allowed for unmet needs to serve as the foundation to concepts, ideas, and eventually innovations.

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Incite Health is a year-long program aimed at transforming primary care through the creation of new ventures. Multidisciplinary teams from across the United States immerse themselves in boot camps, during which they build skills in innovation and engage in interactive curricula on design thinking, lean startup methodology, the patient perspective, and healthcare entrepreneurship from world-class experts. Although patients and caregivers were involved in the co-design process from the start, the teams had an opportunity to receive feedback on their early-stage ideas through a different panel of patients and caregivers, who provided perspective based on their individual health experiences but also used a standard scorecard broken out into 12 domains. Teams went back to the drawing board to perfect their ideas and prototypes based on the feedback. Finally, teams presented their polished ventures to another set of patients and caregivers, investors, partners, and the public on the year-end Pitch Day. Thereafter, Inciters transition from structured learning and innovating through InciteHealth to expanding on a national scale as they advance from apprentice to master, visionary to trailblazer.
 
The Health Collaboratory, an innovation hub that’s focused on amplifying the voice of the patient and caregiver and establishing connections with the broader healthcare system, served as the bridge to patients and caregivers throughout the program. Through the Patient Shark Tank® they were able to ensure that the missing link to innovation in healthcare, patients and caregivers, were represented front and center in helping to shape these innovations. The Patient Shark Tank® is a platform developed to amplify the voice of the patient and caregiver in the design, development, and enhancement of innovations created to serve them.