Innovation Drive 2021

The South African healthcare system is faced with numerous challenges such as resource constraints, extreme patient loads, rising costs and suboptimal health outcomes. Faced with these challenges, healthcare professionals have needed to be resilient, innovative, and increasingly entrepreneurial. Wits Healthcare Innovation (WHI) is looking to assist with the development of solutions to these problems.

The Innovation Drive is a challenge to healthcare professionals to explore barriers they experience within the clinical space and work towards the development and implementation of solutions. WHI has partnered with Wits’ Faculty of Health Sciences and School of Business Sciences to assist with the selection, development, and implementation of a innovation project.

Who should apply?

Anyone who has experienced issues with healthcare delivery and has a potential and impactful solution should apply for this. You may be a faculty member, student, healthcare worker, entrepreneur, or community member. Your solution should look to improve the access, experience, or quality of healthcare within South Africa. 

How to apply

Click Here for the attached document for details on how to apply. Applications close at 23:59 (CAT) on the 14th of November 2021.

We are looking for proposal submissions to solve an urgent problem you or your team face. The winning applicant will be selected by a panel of WHI, Wits Faculty of Health Sciences and Wits School of Business Sciences. To apply, please click on the link below.

The questions can be previewed below for you to work on your answer prior to submission.

What is the problem?
What is the healthcare problem you are trying to solve? Try to be as specific as possible.

List as many bullet points of how the problem is being experienced.

Who are the different stakeholders?
The question you need to ask yourself is, ‘if this problem were to disappear tomorrow, who would benefit from this?’

What are important factors or insights that you have which give context and explain the challenge at hand and why it is important?
Previous experience, budget constraints, existing systems.

What do you envision a solution for this would look like and how could we assist with the development process?
Using your bullet points described above, identify potential features of a solution which would assist with solving this issue.