Mount Sinai Targeted Healthcare Innovation (THRIVE) Fellowship
Mount Sinai has developed and implemented an experiential team science Targeted Healthcare Innovation Education (THRIVE) Fellowship. This program is designed to catalyze team science, creativity and innovation around clinically impactful healthcare technology solutions. Our THRIVE Fellowship participants are demographically diverse, and reflect a range of disciplines, academic backgrounds and degrees.
The THRIVE Fellowship is a 9-month program for participants from diverse professional backgrounds to develop MedTech innovations. The program is intentionally designed to enable participants to gain first-hand experience in MedTech innovation and to develop team science skills by collaborating with talented and motivated trainees with diverse backgrounds, disciplines and perspectives. This program provides an experiential team science platform for participants to take a project idea from concept to commercially viable innovation.
The THRIVE program utilizes a competitive application process to recruit trainees from across the Icahn School of Medicine (ISMMS), the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) and the Mount Sinai Health System (MSHS). Each year, the program begins in early fall. During this semester, weekly Q&A sessions are utilized to introduce participants to MSHS faculty as potential mentors, and access is provided to a library of faculty videos focused on key concepts and topics as well as domain expertise to inspire and inform innovation development. Some of the topics covered during the fall session were multi-organ transplantation, OR tool tray tracking, therapeutic localized hypothermia, and automated audiogram analysis. Team formation began in early December and was completed by the end of 2023. During the winter, teams agree on a project focus, recruit advisors, engage mentors and develop an initial project pitch. Each team is allocated dollars for skills training, tech resources, and consultations. Guided by mentors, teams subsequently participate in internal (MSIP Innovation Sprint, Tech Launchpad [Poster Competition, Innovation Showcase, and Mount Sinai Pitch Challenge]; and i3 Genesis), and external (NYCRIN I-Corps, New York Business Plan Competition [NYBPC]) innovation competitions. Teams are also encouraged to participate in MSIP’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. Applicants and participants were comprised of a diverse group of trainees (MS, PhD pre-doc, medical students, residents, fellows and Postdocs) from a broad range of basic science and clinical departments.
For 2023 we received 71 applications, interviewed 40 applicants and accepted 29 fellows.
A paper was submitted and is currently under review by Academic Medicine. There are six teams in this cohort working on projects on everything from gynecology to orthopedics.
ConduITS is supported by NCATS of the NIH’s CTSA Program. Any use of CTSA-supported resources requires citation of grant number UL1TR004419 awarded to ISMMS in the acknowledgment section of every publication resulting from this support. Adherence to the NIH Public Access Policy is also required.
