PHC Med Staff

Key takeaways: Physician innovation is often limited by time constraints, lack of support, and complex legal and operational barriers, making it difficult to “fail fast.” A failed wearable troponin monitoring project highlighted the importance of early contracts, IP protection, and structured planning. In response, a clear innovation roadmap emphasizes early stakeholder engagement, strong legal frameworks, data infrastructure, and regulatory planning to successfully launch and scale healthcare innovations.

• Take the time for paperwork
• Find your village and champions
• Keep innovating
• Build a culture of innovation

Challenges for physician innovation:

• Bandwidth
• Lack of knowledge and support
• Cannot just “fail fast”

Our failure to launch:

• Wearable troponin monitoring
• No contracts in place
• Unable to negotiate co-funding
• Unable to figure out hospital wi-fi connection to device.
• Unfavourable contracts
  • Few weeks before launch, the company pulled back. Since no contract was in place they were able to pull out without consequence. There was no NDA, so they could technically use the protocol we developed for them for their future studies.
• We developed a roadmap learning from this experience.

Innovation Roadmap:

1. Find support from Innovarium
2. Engage with clinical leadership and partners
3. Design protocol & determine budget
4. Review contracts and legal agreements
5. Plan for intellectual property (IP)
6. Leverage PHC data infrastructure
7. Plan for regulatory approvals
8. Launch, evaluate & share results

1. Find out how Innovarium can support your project.

• Innovarium: for general or clinical innovations
• PHC Ventures: for working with industry or commercialization

2. Engage with clinical leadership and partners

• Connect with operations early
• Access the downstream impact of your innovation. (Who are all the people that will be affected by your innovation.)
• Obtain mentors, champions, patient partners

3. Design protocol and determine budget

• Free consult with advancing health
• Innovarium funding pages
• Determine team member recognition early especially if IP is involved
• Industry overhead

4. Set correct framework of contracts and legal agreements: Key step in all successful innovation projects. Will protect you and your ideas.

• Investigator contracts, nondisclosure agreement, project contracts, device loan agreement.
• Indemnity and insurance
• Legal counsel, consult with ventures, CMPA Health Canada

5. Consider Intellectual Property (IP)

• PHC policy
• PHC ventures
• Innovation UBC

6. Leverage the PHC data infrastructure.

• Clinical informatics
• Data analytics & evaluation
• Integrated Health Informatics Datalab.
• Easier than expected, but some data quality limitations.

7. Regulatory approvals

• Research ethics
• Privacy impact assessment
• Security threat risk assessment
• Health Canada
• Biomed
• IMITS (support)

8. Launch, evaluate and spread

• Evaluation metrics
• Scalability
• PHC Communications
• Publication

Key Takeaways: Dr. Tony Wan’s innovation journey highlights how targeted, patient-centered solutions can significantly improve care and efficiency. Initiatives like the DVT clinic reduced ER visits by nearly 50%, while the heparin project minimized unnecessary treatment, lowering costs and improving outcomes. His experience underscores the need to break down silos, build collaborative win-win solutions, and tailor care rather than relying on one-size-fits-all approaches.

• Many people would be coming back and fourth from emergency to home.

DVT clinic:

• Removed the need to go to emergency room. They could get treatment here.

Number of patients going to ER for DVT decreased 44% in the first 6 months. This was sustainable as the data for the last 7 years shows around a 50% decrease.

What was learned:

• We work in silos
• Nearly impossible to ask a person or group to do a task, no matter how small, even if the task will save a lot of time and/or money
• Need to find win-win situations. Tasks that will help the other person as well.

This DVT pathway is established in SPH, MSJ, it is also in UPCCs, and family doctors in the local area.

Heparin project:

• The culture of one size fits all indiscriminate use of heparin for thromboprophylaxis in hospital
  • Unnecessary use of heparin has significant impact to our patients, providers, health system, and planetary health

• Our approach was different -> Give patients what they need not a standardized amount for everyone.
  • Needed a pharmacist to move this project forward. Got support from foundation in a 6 month trial.

• Anticoagulation Stewardship Program
  • Cost savings of $52,000 per year
  • 11,500 injections avoided
  • Reduces nursing hours, carbon footprint.
• Benefits patients, providers, health system and the planet

Key takeaways: Vancouver is rapidly becoming a global health innovation hub, where care, science, and data converge to drive scalable solutions. Through connected ecosystems like PHC Ventures and the PHC Data Hub, innovations move from concept to global impact, extending beyond hospital walls. This approach accelerates collaboration, digital health advancement, and measurable economic and clinical value.

A revitalized innovation district: once a industrial corridor between two highways, now the anchor of Vancouver’s next Health Innovation District.

Our vision: a global health innovation hub. To create health solutions that start in Vancouver and scale across Canada and the world.

Vancouver is becoming a global health innovation hub – where care, science and data converge.

Beyond the hospital walls: extending vancouvers digital health reach

• A connected data ecosystem linking clinicans, researches and innovators across BC
• The PHC Data hub enables AI, clinical research and digital product validation at scale.
• Digital health innation that starts in Vancouver, reaching patients and partners around the world.

PHC Ventures: Commercialization Pathway

1. Concept and feasibility: TRL(technology readiness level) 1-3
2. Comonent and lab validation TRL 4-5
3. Prototype and system demonstration TRL 6
4. Operational pilat and field validation TRL7-8
5. Commercial deployment and scaling TRL 9

1. Engage clinicians and partners

• 250+ PHC SMEs engaged
• 30+ industry partners
• 60+ innovation projects

2. Build and validate innovation

• 9 digital supercluster projects
• 20 employees (innovation, data, commercialization)

3. Generate economic value

• 12M revenue generated
• 10 equity seed investments
• 2 companies incubated

4. Return value to PHC

• 100k innovation dividend paid
• 5M salaries offset
• 1M physician fees paid
• Contributions supporting patient programs

5. Strengthen innovation culture

• More SMEs engaged
• More partners attracted
• More innovations supported

Question: Does VCH have anything similar? How are we collaborating with them?

• They have a director of innovation, Rachael Ritchie.
• Intake process, more centralized than ours
• Intensive focus on planetary health
• When we want to scale things, we are on very similar systems (Cerner), and lab equipment.
• They pull fourth year surgeons out of the rotation for about 1-2 weeks and pair them with a businessperson and an engineer and they come up with a product or an intervention that is targeted towards the question that they ask each year
  • Example: Last year the question they asked was “what if there was no hospitals.”
• At PHC we have skunkworks, which is designed to bring in multidisciplinary teams together.
• We shared the roadmap with VCH right away as it was published.

Question: Regarding breast localizing seeds for cancer surgery, these products are already available. If we can trial seeds here, there could be cost savings. To approach Innovarium do you need to have unique IP or a new product that can be brought to market or can this be a project build around something that is commercially available?

• No, it doesn’t have to be IP. We still want to bring this in and try it. Reach out to Innovarium, and we can discuss ways of taking the idea forward.
• We work quite a bit with industry partners with innovations that have already been developed within varying stages of the technology readiness level, so we can certainly help even if the innovation hasn’t come from within.
• Industry partners are looking to providence to partner with them for product validation, might need access to data, physician’s lenses, so we are always happy to support them.