A top research hospital in Montréal has opened an innovation hub to reduce the gap between lab discovery and patient care across Québec.
“It’s making sure we can work together on the ground and test our solution.”
Marc Plamondon, Airudi
The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and its research arm, The Institute, officially launched the IMPACT Centre on Tuesday. The initiative aims to connect local companies developing medical technologies—from AI-powered clinical software to cancer vaccines—with the health centre’s network to speed up implementation timelines, cut down on costs, and improve patient care.
With this new approach, “a discovery made in one of our laboratories doesn’t have to travel very far before it begins changing how we care for our patients,” Dr. Rhian Touyz, executive director and chief scientific officer at The Institute, said on Tuesday.
Québec’s healthcare system has grown more strained in recent years. One and a half million Québecers don’t have a family doctor, thousands of doctors left the public sector this year, and emergency room wait times were the worst in the country last year. The MUHC is hoping more technological adoption can help ease the strain, by making it easier for early-stage medtech startups in Canada to prove their technology is functional—and actually useful—in clinical settings.
Dr. Alan Forster, The Institute’s director of innovation, performance, and quality, told BetaKit that the initiative hopes to address several pain points that companies face when trying to get their medical tech into clinical settings. The IMPACT Centre hopes to offer access to medical expertise and give partnering companies credibility.
“They need clinical environments to test their products, or first adopters,” Forster said. “We want to greatly accelerate that.”
RELATED: Inside the Calgary medtech company born from one man’s determination to treat his own son
The IMPACT Centre hopes to have 20 to 30 startups working on projects with the Institute per year, Forster said. He added that though the Centre doesn’t yet have an associated investment fund, one of its goals is to create one or to work alongside existing investment vehicles to financially support medtech startups.
Several tech companies already partnered with the MUHC showcased their tech at The Institute on Tuesday. Ottawa-based Lumenix has developed the AI-powered monitoring system AIMS—a monitoring system that aims to prevent the spread of infection within hospitals. Its always-on surveillance sensors issue a warning signal to hospital staff and patients’ families when people approach a patient without having sanitized their hands (though it keeps individuals’ identities anonymous, the company says).
Another was Montréal-based Airudi, which makes AI-infused software for organizations across sectors like healthcare and transportation. It demoed a platform that it developed with the MUHC to optimize nurse staffing and assignments, called ENACT.
The IMPACT Centre is a “junction between innovation and operation,” Marc Plamondon, Airudi vice-president of business development, told BetaKit. “It’s making sure we can work together on the ground and test our solution.”
Feature image courtesy MUHC.