SkillCare, a manufacturer of specialty healthcare products, on Tuesday announced the launch of the SkillCare Clinical Innovation Partnership (SCIP). The program is designed to help healthcare providers commercialize cutting-edge clinical needs and ideas.
The program allows clinicians and organizations to work with the New Rochelle, New York-based company to develop products by identifying needs, refining concepts, and evaluating feasibility. Skill-Care CEO Jonathan Treiber told Fierce Healthcare that the program has been “nearly 50 years in the making.”
“Skillcare has been around for nearly 50 years,” Treiber said. “And my father-in-law, who started the company, always felt that developing products in collaboration with clinicians was the most important thing.”
Treiber said there are two main “paths” for clinicians and organizations to enter SCIP programs. It either presents a problem that requires a product solution, or it presents an innovation itself.
“We’re seeing a consistent influx of these types of opportunities,” Treiber said. “We wanted to create a framework for evaluating them and understanding what paths we know they fit into. And ultimately all paths end up in the same place.”
Treiber added that the idea behind the new program already existed, but only informally.
“We’ve had these proven routes for years, so now it’s just a matter of putting pen to paper,” Treiber said. “And then we build a structure around that that we can talk about consistently and publicly.”
Corewell Health and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) are two early adopters of the program, according to the announcement.
Skill-Care is also working with the VCU College of Engineering on research into fecal management flow positioning devices. The idea for this device came from the health system’s ICU nurses.
“Having a partner with the experience of taking products from concept to market makes a meaningful difference,” said Dr. Casey Gray, VCU School of Engineering, in a statement. “It helps move ideas forward in a practical and scalable way.”
