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The Municipality of Rotterdam is, with the Health Innovation Challenge 2017, trying to recruit startups and SMEs in effort to solve health, communication and patient empowerment issues in the Rotterdam region. Rotterdam trusts you to deliver. Can you?

The Health Innovation Challenge (HIC) is an initiative of the Rotterdam municipality to stimulate care innovation. During the Health Innovation Challenge, startups and SMEs from within and outside the healthcare sector are encouraged to, together with renowned healthcare institutions, generate ideas and solutions for essential organizational challenges in healthcare. For a startup, this is a great opportunity to be able to test your solution to a specific issue and get the opportunity to collaborate with a large organization.

4 challenges looking for solutions
For the Health Innovation Challenge, four institutions are looking to solve specific challenges within their area of care. Their goals are clear: Improve health by incorporating daily movement, improve patients time when waiting, improve communication in hospitals and improve coordination of trauma care. But the solutions might not be as simple.

When you have an issue, you will probably start by looking at the most logical solution. If you are hungry, you eat. But what if there was a different solution? Something not even close to the subject of eating or even hunger? This might be where the innovative solutions are found.

Challenge: Improve health by incorporating daily movements.
Solution: Close all the streets and force people to bike? Might be a bit too extreme. Alternatively the streets could be adapted to the cyclists instead of the cars with a “green wave”. Coordinating the traffic light in favor of the cyclist allows a continuous flow through the city, making it easier to go by bike.

Do you have the perfect solution to incorporate movement in the city? Read more about the challenge

Challenge: Improve patients time when waiting.
Solution: Having a sleeping room instead of a waiting room? What better way to past time? Well, that is probably debatable. Maybe the solution lies in Escaping the Wait. VR presents the possibility of being somewhere else in your mind, but could also bring other possibilities within education, empowerment and experience.

Does your idea revolutionize waiting-time? Read more about the challenge

Challenge: Improve communication in hospitals.
Solution: Have everyone wear headphones all the time? Might be more confusing than communicative. What about a platform where employees can share ideas and thoughts? Big and small. From top to bottom. Ideanote might do just that.

Do you know the best way to create communication between employees? Read more about the challenge

Challenge: Improve coordination of trauma care.
Solution: Remove all interpersonal interaction and let a supercomputer deal with all coordinations? Too Sci-Fi? Maybe. What about letting a slime mould coordinate the most efficient routes? That is actually a reality. By using this single-cell organisms search for food, the most efficient route is revealed (read more). Inspiration can come from the most unexpected places. Be sure to use it!

Is your coordinations system more innovative than slime mould? Read more about the challenge