Christine Kurihara is the manager of special projects in the Stanford Biodesign Program at Stanford University.

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Many academic programs that focus on health care innovation in developed countries have begun to explore ways of reaching overseas underserved populations with low cost devices and diagnostics. We primarily focus on domestic U.S. needs, but try to find synergies between domestic and overseas components of our Biodesign Program.

In 2001, we launched a fellowship and a course that teach the process of inventing medical devices and accept 8-12 fellows and 50-60 students per year since. The focus has been on training, but several companies launched by graduates of the program actually develop medical devices.

Two independent programs we operate prepare fellows for designing inexpensive medical devices that meet the needs of rural health care in underserved areas of India and East Asia. (First India fellows came to Stanford in 2008.)

We see potential in creating synergy among different parts of Biodesign. We want to see whether the frame of mind developed to find low-cost solutions in India can be recreated in different economic environments. If the cost constraints applied to the India projects affect the thinking of U.S. students and fellows, they may come up with less costly solutions when they design devices for the U.S. market, in a small way helping to address the rising costs of U.S. health care.

To explore that potential, we partnered with the California Healthcare Foundation. Some of our second-year U.S. fellows study needs in Safety Net health centers, hospitals and clinics which serve uninsured or medically underserved patients. The needs identified by fellows drive a new kind of development process that aims at lower cost, simpler design, the use of basic materials and a quicker lab-to-market process. This is not to say we are dumbing down the technology. We simply try to find a way in which cost considerations play a major role in designing new devices.

We have learned much about what that means and how to approach related issues. For example, pediatric needs almost always represent a small market segment and thus rarely drive innovation in the traditional model, the creation of a startup supported by angel or venture investments. Instead our second-year fellows have created a website where they post the needs they discovered during visits to pediatric hospitals. These needs are visible to the entire community of innovators, physicians, parents, engineers, and others, who may have ideas on how to solve related issues. The hope is that the website will help parties identify ideas they have interest in and provide a platform for them to work together on developing the most promising concepts. Those parties could include special interest groups able to fund the development of a particular product.

We have little to report on results as the Web-based project began only recently. However, we continue to explore ways to engage key stakeholders through this platform.