Derisking Health Technology Innovation: From Idea to Pilot

Health technology is a demanding sector. While your innovation holds incredible promise, the path from idea to patient adoption is fraught with unique risks: complex clinical workflows, stringent regulatory hurdles, long sales cycles, and limited access to critical data. Tragically, many promising innovations fail, not because of a poor idea, but because founders bypass the crucial, early steps of validation with clinicians, patients, and health systems.

We are proud to partner with the experts from CHEO (Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario) to bring you this interactive session. This is your chance to learn practical frameworks for de-risking your health technology innovation, ensuring you move confidently from concept to a successful, scalable pilot.

What You’ll Learn

This session is designed to equip you with the strategic lens needed to validate your health solution efficiently and position your company for adoption and investment. Drawing on real-world case studies from Core Innovation’s programs, participants will learn how to:

• Identify and Test Risky Assumptions: Develop a process for zeroing in on your venture’s riskiest clinical and market assumptions and build an efficient plan to test them early.
• Align Validation with Opportunity: Learn how to harmonize clinical validation requirements with tangible market opportunities, ensuring your testing efforts directly support your business goals.
• Design Effective Pilots: Master the art of designing pilot studies and strategic partnerships that provide meaningful data and position your company for smooth adoption by health systems.
• Communicate De-Risking to Funders: Understand how to translate your validation milestones into compelling evidence that resonates with investors and funding bodies, accelerating your investment path.

Who Should Attend

This session is essential for early-stage health technology entrepreneurs, academic researchers, and product developers who are actively building or testing digital health, AI-enabled, or medtech solutions. If you are struggling with clinical access, navigating regulatory concerns, or trying to accelerate your path to a successful pilot and market entry, this framework is for you.

Meet the Speakers

We are thrilled to welcome experts from the forefront of health innovation at CHEO (Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario):

• Sarah Mroz, Innovation Stream @ CHEO
• Asleigh Kennedy, Innovation Stream @ CHEO

They bring deep expertise from working within a health system environment, offering unparalleled insights into the clinical workflows and validation requirements necessary for successful health tech adoption.