Innovation Events & Education
2019
WITS MEDX 2019
In September 2019, together with the WHI Student Society, WHI hosted our first ever WITS MEDx event. A huge success for its inaugural event, WITS MEDx collated speakers in a TED-like fashion. Here, inspiring talks from several leaders of industry and innovation were received by an audience of approximately 100 students and faculty members.
2020
WHI Health Meetups
WHI Health Meetups
A series of health-innovation meetups focused on debate around the needs in South Africa’s healthcare sector and how technology and innovation can be leveraged to meet those needs. Our inaugural Meetup on 12 March 2020 at Jozihub featured two speakers on the role of technology in mental health.
Re-imagine Medical 2020
Investec, in collaboration with The New School and WHI co-created a four-part Webinar series sponsored by Investec bank targeted at young doctors that ran from October – November 2020. See https://www.investec.com/en_za/focus/innovation.html The speakers and topics for these each of the webinars were:
1. Dr Daniel Kraft on The future of healthcare in a post-pandemic world.
2. Dr Amanda Sammann on Designing better healthcare – why everyone should know more about design.
3. Dr Jennifer Wild and Dr Merika Tsitsi on Promoting mental health and resiliency among medical professionals.
4. Dr Chris Mathew and Kojo Baffoe on Understanding and using abundant data in healthcare.
2021
UK South African Tech Hub and Endeavor South African Health Tech Ecosystem
Builder
WHI had the privilege of running a session for the above event. WHI and it’s advisors ran 5 ‘Speed Dating’ sessions for 15 of South Africa’s top (post revenue) health tech startups. Topics included tech, health informatics, business, medicine and design.
Machine Learning in Healthcare Community
WHI is partnering with Dr Chris Fourie (https://www.chrisfourie.africa), in creating a Machine learning in healthcare community in South Africa, bringing together the top minds in machine learning and healthcare to collaborate. Hosted events with speakers will take place on a monthly basis, and WHI will facilitate a number of these events as well as facilitate collaboration between machine learning experts and healthcare leaders in creating solutions to important healthcare problems.
The digital transformation of the Wits Donald Gordon Medical Center (DGMC)
Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre (WDGMC) wants to create and support the conditions for continuous innovation. In doing so it intends to create a common, coherent and cohesive approach to technological innovation at WDGMC. WHI has a proven record of leveraging technology for digital transformation within healthcare and has been contracted to be the official digital transformation partner of WDGMC. WHI in collaboration with BetterWork (https://www.betterwork.co.za/) has sent a proposal to DGMC outlining the first phase of the project- conducting research within DGMC and investigating the barriers to innovation so that they can be adequately addressed in later phases of the project.