Crowdfunding site set up for medical device innovators

A medical device crowdfunding site, Bright Board, has been set up so that surgeons with ideas for medical innovations can receive financial support from other surgeons and medical professionals

Albany Medical Center surgery and paediatrics professor, Allen Carl, set up the crowdfunding site with Christian DiPaola, an assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery and physical rehabilitation at UMass Memorial Health Care.

The idea for Bright Board emerged when Carl noticed the changing industry landscape made it difficult to bridge the gap between surgeons' ideas for new practices and the money to make these ideas a reality, timesunion reported.

Groups with the ability to invest often support people they know or surgeons who agree to use their products, Carl said to the news site.

If a crowd-funding model were popularised, Carl said, surgeons with deep prior knowledge would be throwing their weight and experience behind models that they saw as having potential.

Already appearing on the site, which Carl and DiPaola self-funded with $50,000, is the Albany Scoliosis Brace Project.

The brace, which Carl said to timesunion, is more comfortable than models that exist today, would do the job of the two traditional braces and therefore ease a financial burden on patients.

Forums on the brace’s features and utility are listed on the project page, allowing members to comment with ideas and criticisms.

Through the listing, "a group of surgeons who we trust can move through it and give us their input," Carl said.

Cary Hagan, an adviser to Bright Board said that the concept solves a problem that has troubled the medical device industry for years.

He said to timesunion that medical devices regardless of fields, would see a more efficient path to market through this type of resource, which also instructs surgeons on how to patent their ideas. What a site like this needs, he said, is momentum in ideas and Web traffic.

Hagan said: "In one place, all companies, all surgeons, all stakeholders have the chance to view and have a voice in the process. I was struck that no one had thought of this before.”