Leveraging innovation for global health at Saveetha Institute for Medical & Technical Sciences" 

1.  Saveetha Institute of Medical and technical sciences, one of India’s leading universities with schools of all disciplines under one roof. The majority of patients who seek medical care at Saveetha medical college and hospital are poor and underprivileged, requiring healthcare and assistance. The team at Saveetha is always keen to incubate local innovations that would offer affordable and state of the art health care to serve their most marginalized patients. The opportunities for healthcare innovation are huge in a world where digital tools are giving rise to new health platforms that are increasingly useful to surgeons, community healthcare workers and patients. India is on its way to a future of healthcare that is more predictive, preventive and personalized driven by innovation in healthcare.
   

SIMATS aims to achieve this goal through the launch of its own innovation body, SEED- Saveetha Entrepreneurship and Empowerment Department. SEED is a healthcare incubation initiative that will translate home grown ideas into practical solutions & make it a major hub for healthcare innovation. It will bring together students from Engineering, Medical, and Management colleges of this institute; provide a common platform, exposing them to global surgery and healthcare.
Through SEED students will be able to focus on a central challenge and work on to develop an innovative yet feasible and cost effective solutions in a limited space of time. SEED will encourage in house and global surgery innovation hackathons which can be transformational in generating powerful discussions, facilitating knowledge exchange, and nurturing multi-disciplinary partnerships, as well as connecting students, trainees, and faculty many disciplines to join forces to tackle local and important healthcare challenges.
The goal of the SEED:

1. Nurture successful, young, entrepreneurial minds for solving healthcare-related problem facing low-resource patients in and around Chennai.
2. To help them imbibe the concepts in innovation and empower them with knowledge in technology and design to create impactful - scalable surgical care delivery solutions.

Saveetha Surgical Innovation Heckathon 2019 (11th & 12th March 2019)

A healthcare incubation initiative - SEED (Saveetha Entrepreneurship & Empowerment Department) launch and hackathon workshop was organized in collaboration with Program in Global Surgery & Social Change - Harvard Medical School and Boston's children's hospital. The goal is to create an ecosystem where ideas are seamlessly translated into solving our unmet clinical needs. This event saw the participation of 1200 students from the streams of Medicine, Engineering & Management. Didactic lectures were delivered by stalwarts from various fields ranging from Artificial Intelligence to Rural Surgery.
On day 2, around 120 participants took part in Hackathon. Various challenges for team building like the "Marshmallow challenge" were conducted. Diverse Problem statements ranging from "cancer screening" to "Early detection of shock" were presented to the students. They picked the problem of their choice and formed teams with their counterparts from other streams.
The students were given time to present their solutions to the panel of judges. The teams with best ideas were given prizes and the opportunity to use SEED as a platform to bring their idea into clinical practice and subsequently, the market.