1. What is the innovation?
Dr Anthony Khoury, a world-renowned urologist, and Dr Guy Hidas were exhausted from the inability to receive objective and continuous data about the bladder behaviour of patients with lower tract urological conditions. Their vision was clear about what’s required, but implementing a home bladder monitoring solution is not a walk in the park.
Fast forward 3 years, under the leadership of Gil Hidas, an experienced entrepreneur and CEO, they came up with the iUFlow, a novel device that enables data capture of patient urinary activities and addresses a growing market need for early accurate diagnosis of urological conditions.
2. What benefits does the innovation bring?
The iUFlow is a novel, patented, fully automated and easy to use bladder monitoring device, implemented on a smartphone platform. The iUFlow device is designed and priced to be used over a period of 48-96 hours as required by the patient’s urologist. Multiple studies have demonstrated that the iUFlow is much easier for the patient to use than the traditional methods, and the urologist gets much more accurate and timely data, allowing a quicker and more accurate diagnosis. Several clinical studies have shown that both patients and doctors see the iUFlow as a major improvement over the old way.
3. What commercial success and/or benefit to society has it achieved?
The product has been used in multiple clinical studies and has had 7 abstract presentations in multiple international conferences including the 2016 and 2017 Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand (USANZ), the 2016 and 2017 American Urology Association conferences and the 2016 Société Internationale d’Urologie.
4. What lessons learnt can you share?
Commercialising a medical device product is hard! There are lots of obsolesces and timelines are lengthy. It can take months or years to get your product FDA cleared, patents granted, reimbursements approved etc.
When it’s hard, we always go back to the basics…
- Is it good for the patients? Yes, they love it, they told us so.
- Is it good for health providers? Yes, they love it, they told us so.
- Is my strategy right? Yes, I checked and validated and discussed and confirmed it back and front
….so, keep on pushing, you’re on the right track.
5. How many new jobs has this innovation created?
6