What you missed at ViTAL kickoff: Introducing Digital Health
Edited by Aditya Raj and Giancarlo Nero
Who We Are
First and foremost, ViTAL is a collection of people from diverse, interdisciplinary backgrounds who are united by a shared excitement for healthcare innovation. Our student organization is lucky to also be connected within Northeastern’s larger entrepreneurship community at Mosaic and Northeastern’s healthcare venture incubator, the Health Science Entrepreneurs (HSE), creating a large pool of resources for you (our fellow students) to take your ideas to the next level.
Inspire, Connect, Create
ViTAL is organized into three overarching segments that members can explore and experience firsthand. Each segment stands for a unique set of programming and opportunities coordinated by a dedicated subteam of the E-board. More importantly, although some members of our club have taken the dive into joining startups or launching their own ventures, ViTAL programming is designed to meet members where they are currently at in their healthcare journey. You don’t need to have experience in healthcare innovation, and you don’t necessarily need to be a health sciences major or an aspiring doctor either.
The ViTAL E-board is excited to share just a taste of the opportunities that will be available to students this year, to grow professionally and in community:
(1) Ops
- (almost) Weekly speaker events — Thursdays @ 6pm EST
- Collab events — timing varies
(2) Special Events
- Virtual volunteering — October-November 2020
- Husky Health Innovation Challenge (HHIC), a case competition — March 2021
(3) Ventures
- Intro events — timing varies
- Applications and interviews for ViTAL Ventures Consulting (VVC) — Spring 2021
So, in summary, to soak it all up: (1) get inspired by our speaker series → (2) put your knowledge to the test in our hands-on case competition, and → (3) consult with real healthcare startups.
Digital Health
At Kickoff, the ViTAL E-board also announced the theme for this year’s programming: digital health. In the wake of COVID-19, digital connection has become absolutely essential, and healthcare has certainly not been immune to this shift. Digital health encompasses a broad variety of modalities, which the FDA defines as spanning across mHealth (mobile health), health IT, wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalized medicine. Digital health has also been applied to a number of specialties within healthcare. To name just a few HSE ventures: Burncam works on leveraging telemedicine to help burn care, Phimentum uses technology for orthodontic diagnosis, and Heads Up Health uses IT to better visualize and optimize health data for both patients and professionals.
In smaller breakout groups at our Kickoff, we looked at this premise further to define what digital health meant to each member of ViTAL by brainstorming examples. One member mentioned Teladoc, demonstrating how these solutions could scale to a massive scope. Another discussed work being done at larger healthcare companies like Johnson & Johnson, who see the expansion of digital health in the future. On the flip side was companies making their way from technology into healthcare like Apple, who continues to add more health monitoring features (most recently Blood O2) into their wearables.
COVID-19 has accelerated the acceptance of some of these digital health solutions in the present, but this year’s discussions will also delve into where they are headed in the future.
Connection
Although we miss the face-to-face conversations that a virtual format can’t necessarily replace, we are still looking to build community and connection within ViTAL. If you haven’t already:
- Join our newsletter to hear about events and opportunities!
- Attend weekly events and engage with speakers and topics
- Join our Slack community:
- Introduce yourself on the #introduce-yourself channel
- Join #coffee-chats to be paired with another random member of the club every 2 weeks, meet and chat!
- Finally, want to get involved in the behind-the-scenes? Apply to our newly-released E-board positions for Finance Lead and Branding/Web Designer
Missed this event? View the recording at this link.
