Specialized healthcare products manufacturer Skil-Care announced Tuesday the launch of its Skil-Care Clinical Innovation Partnership (SCIP), a program aimed at aiding providers in turning frontline clinical needs and ideas into commercialized products.
With the program, clinicians and organizations can work with the New Rochelle, N.Y.-based company to develop products through identifying needs, refining concepts and assessing feasibility. The program is nearly “50 years in the making,” Skil-Care CEO Jonathan Treiber told Fierce Healthcare.
“Skil-Care has been around for almost 50 years,” Treiber said. “And my father-in-law, who started the company, always felt that it was of the utmost importance to develop products in cooperation with clinicians.”
Treiber said there are two main “pathways” for clinicians and organizations to enter the SCIP program: either presenting an issue that needs a product solution or an innovation itself.
“There's just such a consistent inbound flow of these types of opportunities,” Treiber said. “We really wanted to create the framework to evaluate them, to understand which pathway you know they're going to fit into. And then all roads kind of end up in the same place.”
Treiber added that the idea behind the new program already existed—just informally.
“We've had these proven pathways for so many years that now we're just putting pen to paper,” Treiber said. “And creating a structure around it that we can talk about consistently and publicly.”
Two early adopters of the program are Corewell Health and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), according to the announcement.
Skil-Care is also working with the VCU College of Engineering on a fecal management flow positioning device, the idea that originated with an ICU nurse at the health system.
“Having a partner with experience taking products from concept to market makes a meaningful difference,” said Casey Grey, Ph.D., VCU College of Engineering, in a statement. “It helps move ideas forward in a way that’s both practical and scalable.”