The 3rd Annual Medical Capital Innovation Competition has been set for April 17 and April 18 at Cleveland’s Global Center for Health Innovation. This year’s theme is “AR/VR/XR: The New Reality of Healthcare.”
The symposium will allow participants a chance to discuss how virtual reality, augmented reality and cross-reality technologies can engage doctors and patients, bringing healthcare to even higher levels.
$100,000 in award money, as well as co-development and mentoring opportunities, will be offered to worldwide AR/VR/XR startups in collegiate and professionals divisions. Applications began being accepted Jan. 14 and will continue to be accepted until March 15.
BioEnterprise CEO and President Aram Nerpouni said both virtual reality and augmented reality are changing many industries including education, IT, marketing and retail. Healthcare, he said, is the next step for these technologies. Nerpouni said the competition provides these startup companies to get access to tools that can assist them in coming up with innovative methods to better both the care and experience of patients.
BioEnterpise puts on the two-day business plan pitch competition each year, allowing teams a chance to showcase their technologies to a panel of expert judges. Industry experts will judge them based on certain criteria that include team strength, technical viability and others. In 2018, there were 180 applicant teams from 33 states and 24 countries – some hailed from Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University and Western Reserve University.
In 2017, there were nearly 650 AR and VR companies with a small amount of healthcare clientele. In the last 10 years, there have been about 140 AR/VR/XR deals for the healthcare industry with about $5 billion invested. Most of the deals have taken place in the last five years, which is a 1,000 percent increase in that timeframe. The current AR and VR healthcare related applications are found for mental health conditions like anxiety, dementia, PTSD and phobias, pain management, digital diagnostics, patient education, and surgical training and guidance.
The Medical Capital Innovation Competition is supported by numerous entities including but not limited to: Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, JumpStart, Cleveland Clinic Innovations, MetroHealth Systems, ProMedica and Cuyahoga County.
To learn more about the competition or apply, go to mcic.bioenterprise.com.