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Redesign of a Screening Process for VA Homeless Housing
Standardizing the screening processes for homeless housing among VA facilities can make programs more accessible to veterans experiencing...
Repurposing drugs. Helping decision makers better understand how to spend on disaster preparedness. Using smart phone technology to improve malaria diagnosis.
Those are the 3 entrepreneurial projects green-lighted by HHS’ Ventures program, a component of the innovation initiative led by the HHS IDEA Lab—supporting employees who “want to do things differently.” The Ventures Fund is a competition that provides growth-stage funding, 15 months of mentoring, and management tools to support teams as they work on sustainable business models for their applications.
Related: Bold Ideas Competition
This year’s projects are:
- Collaborative Use Repurposing Engine (CURE), a web-based platform developed by the FDA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The platform enables crowdsourcing of medical information from health care providers to guide potentially life-saving interventions and facilitate the development of new drugs for neglected diseases;
- Economic Evaluation for Public Health Emergencies, led by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response, set to develop an economic evaluation architecture to improve decision making and communication around public health emergencies; and
- Watch It, Parasite! a joint effort of the NIH National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to use digitized imaging of blood smears to detect malaria parasites. This project “has the potential to improve accuracy over manual assessment,” HHS says.
“We are already witnessing how these catalytic activities are enabling us to develop a community of innovators yielding results with impact,” said HHS Chief Technology Officer Bryan Sivak. Previous rounds of Ventures Fund teams included the NIH 3D Print Exchange, an online, community-driven portal where researchers and educators can download biomedical structure files that can be printed on a desktop 3D printer for “high-quality, scientifically accurate 3D prints.”
More information on the Ventures Fund is available at http://www.hhs.gov/idealab.