The Fira de Barcelona event will showcase the latest technological solutions and innovations
HEALTHIO invites patients, professionals and innovators to create a new healthcare ecosystem
HEALTHIO will bring together healthcare users, professionals, entrepreneurs and innovators with the aim of creating a new ecosystem which all the stakeholders can assist in designing. Thus, from 16 to 18 October, Pavilion 8 of the Montjuïc venue will bring together more than 300 speakers and the technological breakthroughs achieved in recent years which seek to facilitate the empowerment of patients and their decision-making.
Organised by Fira de Barcelona, HEALTHIO is defined as an arena for the exchange of knowledge and pilot and commercial trials, in which visitors can discover, try out and test the latest cutting-edge innovations in healthcare free of charge.
In this regard, Dr Jordi Serrano-Pons, scientific director and co-founder of HEALTHIO, explains that “it’s not a medical conference but rather an open space in which, over three days, citizens, patients, healthcare employees and innovators will come together to pool their latest experiences in the field of health”.
As for Miquel Serrano, director of HEALTHIO, he stresses that “it’s a new format which provides citizens with the opportunity to meet, in a single place, health professionals taking part as speakers and innovators displaying their latest products by means of informative guided tours”.
Thus, the range of HEALTHIO activities is made up of different guided tours and the talks, which will be held in the four agoras in a format enabling visitors to fully interact. The guided tours are designed to enable leading companies and institutions in the field of health to promote their latest developments and products to visitors at first hand in an easily understandable manner.
In total, there will be 25 guided tours scheduled every 15 minutes in the three areas of health and well-being, personalised medicine of the future and chronic diseases and ageing. They will address, among other issues, the promotion of health and prevention activities, mental health, patient empowerment, the future of medicine, information on cancer and ways of simplifying the control of diabetes and respiratory diseases.
In addition, the agoras will bring together, through 310 talks given by patients, healthcare employees, entrepreneurs and system innovators, including Nerea López Maldonado, medical coordinator of the AEEG (Spanish Glycogen Storage Disease Association), who will explain her experience of
jointly running an association of patients with a minority disease in her position as doctor, Gabriel Capella, researcher and director of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute, who will talk about his research into the interpretation of DNA variants for the treatment of hereditary cancer, Jesús Bonilla, director of Sanitas Hospitales, Eduardo W. Jorgensen de Vizcarrondo, winner of the 2017 Spanish Innovator award presented by the MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology), and Ignacio Hernández Medrano, a neurologist at the Ramón y Cajal Hospital in Madrid and the co-founder of Savana and Mendelian.
The different medical innovations set to be unveiled at HEALTHIO include Social Diabetes, an app created by a patient to facilitate self-management of diabetes, Adan Medical, a company headed by two doctors that develops systems for severe allergic reaction management, B-wom, an app designed to aid female self-care by means of prevention, with tips and training exercises to strengthen the pelvic floor, MJN Neuroserveis, a company created by the father of a young girl with epilepsy, who has developed an earpiece to constantly evaluate the risk of suffering a seizure, RutiLight, a project developed by surgeons at the Germans Trias Hospital, consisting of a device adapted to current-day surgical instruments, and New Born Solutions, a mechanism which uses a non-invasive system with ultrasounds to detect potential cases of meningitis.
In addition, the Health & Bio Team Dating will take place in the HEALTHIO Activities Area, comprising a series of meetings between innovators/researchers and investors organised by Biocat, CataloniaBio & Health Tech and Banco Sabadell with the purpose of forming teams which can lead to the creation of new startups. The Game Jam of the Barcelona Fundació Clínic, a meeting for developers to create a videogame applied to health will also be held, as well as a workshop conducted by AQuAS (the Agency for Health Quality and Evaluation of Catalonia) on innovative public procurement.
HEALTHIO will host 115 exhibiting companies, including Intersystems, Sanitas Hospitales, Caregiverspro, Doctors Without Borders, Elsevier and leading hospitals such as the Hospital Clínic, Vall d’Hebron, Infantil Sant Joan de Déu de Barcelona, Germans Trias de Badalona and the Consorci Sanitari Integral, who will reveal their experiences and success stories.
Barcelona, October 2018