Dr. Gary Goldish and biomedical engineer Andrew Hansen have created a hub of medical device innovation in an unexpected place — the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center — to serve an overlooked population. Goldish, director of extended care and rehabilitation at the VA, and Hansen joined forces in 2009 to launch the Minneapolis Adaptive Design and Engineering program (VA-MADE) to develop adaptive technologies to help veterans with disabilities. VA-MADE has received 17 patents, raised more than $10 million in research funding and grown to a staff of two dozen. Goldish and Hansen this month are applying for a $4.5 million grant to make the program a national resource for clinician-driven product development for veterans and accelerate product commercialization.
Q: How did VA-MADE get started?
Goldish: I'm a rehab doctor; physical medicine rehab is my specialty. My subspecialty is spinal cord injury. We're trying to change what people with physical disabilities can do. I was writing my ideas down for many years in a notebook. They sat in a file and didn't go anywhere until I met Andy. We hit it off, and I realized that there's a formula here for how innovation can get out of my brain or off a piece of paper.
Hansen: I honestly just want to solve problems. I want to solve good problems, real clinical problems. I don't care if they're wheelchairs or exercise equipment. We're really interested in what's called participation. Participation is really: Are you able to do the things you want to do? The things at work, school, family, social things. Are you going out there and being you?
Q: What would you hope to accomplish as a national center?
Goldish: There are things we've learned in the last 10 years about how to work within the VA that we would like to share with other innovation people. We are now writing a center of excellence grant to bring this model to center stage of the VA. We're going to use the University of Minnesota, which is good at marketing technology.
If you solve a problem only for the veteran and it doesn't have a great market value, if it doesn't get manufactured, it doesn't help the veteran. If we can get a product out there and it comes back and helps veterans, that's my primary goal. This gives us a pot of money to support the infrastructure so that we can write more grants, do more research and become a resource to the rest of the country.
Hansen: One piece we would add is business personnel. We have some businesspeople in our group but we could strengthen that side where they're out doing early market assessments and talking to industry stakeholders and trying to understand regulatory hurdles. We want to do those things as early as possible so as soon as an idea comes in. Most ideas aren't going to become a product. We want to figure out which ones aren't going to be, quickly, so we can get onto the promising ones.
