Here we describe "Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Medicine" (IEMed), a short elective course that exposed medical students to innovation and entrepreneurship in digital health.

# Introduction

Entrepreneurial and software-driven technology companies, known as "tech", are reinventing established industries, including transportation, national defense, and even healthcare. For the past three years, investment in digital health - a broad category of tech including analytics, biosensing, population health management, medical records, and software-driven devices - has exceeded $4B annually. However, implementation of techology into clinical workflow has been slow.
Medical students and young physicians are well positioned to contribute to tech's foray into biomedicine for two reasons. First, they are comfortable with technology, which permeates most aspects of their lives as consumers. Second, they possess insight about unmet clinical needs and care delivery.
Unfortunately, medical students are not exposed to opportunities in tech even though industry efforts can represent "translational research in its rawest form".

# Approach

To address this problem, we created an elective course for second-year medical students at our institution (a private medical school in a large metropolitan city in the United States) called IEMed, which was held in the fall semester and lasted three months. We developed the following learning objectives:

- Assess a startup using the business model canvas as a framework.
- Learn about healthcare economics and reimbursement.
- Appreciate how behavioral economics assesses decision-making.
- Review advances in digital health and health information technology.
- Survey accelerators, incubators, and other startup resources.
- Learn about patents and the fundamentals of intellectual property.
- Understand the role of angel, seed, & venture capital investors.
- Meet like-minded students, clinicians, engineers, and startup founders.
- See how academic clinicians collaborate with the tech industry.

Nine students enrolled in 2014, and ten students enrolled in 2015. Each learning objective was explored through a lecture and Q&A featuring a guest speaker with relevant experience. Sessions were also accompanied by suggested readings. We recorded videos of several sessions to provide educational assets to a broader audience. The full course schedule, reading materials, and videos of select sessions were available through a course website.
Students also completed a project in teams of three. Each team selected and evaluated a startup company using the "business model canvas": a visual chart describing market strategy, value proposition, infrastructure, customers, finances, etc. ( Figure 1). Each week, teams focused on one component of the canvas, learned more about their startup by conducting research online, or speaking with founders of the startup and/or potential customers, and shared their findings with the class. We also connected medical students with MBA students at our institution's business school to provide input. At the end of the course, teams presented their canvases and discussed clinical implementation and business development strategies.