CAMTech Chats

In episode 12 of CAMTech Chats, we'll hear from Nitesh Jangir, an electronics engineering and co-founder of Coeo Labs, a medical device company with a vision to prevent deaths in emergency and critical care. Nitesh shares his story of how he began innovating solutions to address challenges in neonatal health in India while iterating medical technologies with input from innovators outside of India, like Dr. Data Santorino, CAMTech Uganda’s Country Manager. We’ll learn from Nitesh about how South-South collaborations like this help to accelerate solutions from ideation towards commercialization and patient impact. CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.

Dr. Donna Brezinski trained as a neonatologist at Yale and Harvard Medical Schools before she founded Little Sparrows Technologies and the bili-hut, the first ever line of portable, high-intensity jaundice therapy devices. In episode 11 of CAMTech Chats, Dr. Brezinski underscores the importance of commercializing solutions that improve health in high, low and middle-income countries. She also shares stories of challenges women face sourcing funding for medtech and explains how diversity in skillsets helps accelerate the bili-hut towards patient impact. CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.

Lattice Innovations, CAMTech’s partner in India, sees the process of human-centered design as one that’s similar to building a lattice structure. It takes a bunch of building blocks to make a complete structure because multiple facets go into product design and development. In episode 10 of CAMTech Chats, Sahil Mehta and Soura Bhattacharyya underscore the differences between markets in resource-limited settings, highlight gender gap trends in India’s medtech and startup ecosystem, and look back at how sharing a cab ride started their journey to building India’s design factory. CAMTech Chats is hosted by Nicholas Diamond.

The CAMTech Uganda Co-Creation Lab at Mbarara University of Science and Technology is not your typically laboratory. Innovators there trade lab benches for desk space, white lab coats for CAMTech Uganda Medtech Hack-a-thon t-shirts, and microscopes for business models to accelerate affordable medical technologies towards commercialization and patient impact. One of those low-cost solutions is SaniDrop, a locally-made hand sanitizer developed by experts in public health, clinical medicine, engineering, and business at the Co-Creation Lab. The National Bureau of Standards recently issued SaniDrop the Q-MARK, which is a product quality certification for customers purchasing products on the market in Uganda. In episode 9 of CAMTech Chats, we’ll hear from Hannington Kanyesigye, CAMTech Uganda’s Innovation and Productization Officer, about SaniDrop’s journey from ideation towards patient impact. CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.

In episode 8 of CAMTech Chats, CAMTech’s Director, Dr. Kris Olson, chats with Jonathan Jackson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Dimagi, about the translational grant CAMTech awarded Dimagi six years ago, the growth of CommCare, engaging frontline health providers in human centered-design, and what he wishes all innovators in impact-oriented social enterprise would be laser focused on. CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.

CAMTech uses a co-creation model to accelerate the cycle from idea to patient impact and commercialization by convening experts in clinical medicine, public health, engineering, design, business, and government. In a way, Andrea Ippolito puts a face on CAMTech’s co-creation model. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University, and she’s held positions at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and General Services Administration, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston Scientific. She’s also the co-founder of Smart Scheduling, which athenahealth acquired in 2016. In episode 7 of CAMTech Chats, we’ll hear from Andrea about innovating in these different sectors, discuss the importance of failing fast, and learn about her challenges and successes as a woman working in innovation. CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.

In episode 6 of CAMTech Chats, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, National Pubic Radio’s Africa Correspondent, opens with a sound bite from her lecture delivered on the International Day of the Girl titled Why Reporting the Voices of African Women and Girls Matters. Her talk is incredibly well-suited to open this episode of CAMTech Chats, where we sought out the story of the youngest innovator at the 6th Annual CAMTech Uganda Medtech Hack-a-thon, a 9-year old-girl named Ehrina, and her mother, Dr. Viola Nyakato. Dr. Nyakato is the Dean of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST). Sandra Butler sat down with both Ehrina and Dr. Nyakato to hear about why they attend this year’s Hack-a-thon to innovate to improve community health services to attain universal health coverage.

“You do not need to have a technical background. You need to have a desire to solve a problem and the willingness to work towards a solution.” In episode 5 of CAMTech Chats, we’re joined by Andrew Schwartz of GEMs Boxes, the team which won the $10,000 Post-Hack-a-thon Award during CAMTech’s 2016 Opioid Epidemic Challenge Summit & Hack-a-thon with the GE Foundation. As CAMTech responds to the opioid epidemic in New York during the Empire State Opioid Epidemic Innovation Challenge, Andrew reflects on why he first decided to participate and what he hoped to accomplish with the GEMs Boxes team. CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.

In episode 4 of CAMTech Chats, Sudha and Adarsh Natarajan highlight challenges and successes women face in the STEM, corporate and medtech startup ecosystem locally in India and globally, explain how championing gender equity has translated to raising their two daughters, and demonstrate how closing the gender gap in medtech can help accelerate solutions towards commercialization and patient impact. CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.

"If we take a human-centered design approach and think about patient-driven innovation, by using [CAMTech’s platform and] co-creation model, you come up with minimally viable products that are more likely to solve people’s real needs at the point of care." In episode three of CAMTech Chats, Dr. Kris Olson, CAMTech's Director, highlights CAMTech's methodologies of co-creation, human-centered design and patient-driven innovation to be able to address a wide range of unmet healthcare needs, from the gender gap in medtech to gun violence prevention. CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.

In episode 2 of CAMTech Chats, we’ll hear from Katie Kirsch who manages in-Africa operations, relationships and marketing for Sisu Global Health. Last year, Sisu Global Health won a Validation Award from Saving Lives at Birth. Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) also won a Transition to Scale Award from Saving Lives at Birth for the Augmented Infant Resuscitator (AIR) device, which came from CAMTech's open innovation platform and continues to traverse the road towards commercialization. MUST, CAMTech and Sisu Global Health each participated in the Accelerating Saving Lives at Birth Xcelerator Workshop in Nairobi this month. CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.

Episode 1 of CAMTech Chats shares the stories of two Ugandan software developers from Andela Uganda, a network of technology leaders helping companies build high-performing engineering teams by investing in Africa’s most talented software developers. Backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV and Spark Capital, Andela is catalyzing the growth of tech ecosystems across the African continent while solving the global technical talent shortage. Hadijah and Basemera discuss their roles at Andela Uganda, barriers women face in STEM fields and the gender gap. “Where your fear stops is where your success begins." CAMTech Chats is moderated by Nicholas Diamond.