In spring semester 2022 Patrick Hanley, Diego Garau and Minh Ngoc Le joined Operating Room Companion for their Inside-The-Venture-Project as part of the MAN 633 course.
The objective of their project was to provide assistance to Operating Room Companion (ORC) by developing an action plan for the company. Therefore, they performed a thorough analysis of the business environment in the medical technology device industry to enhance the company’s overview of the current size and the barriers ORC faces in the German market and the international medical device market as a whole. The healthcare industry is transforming, and VR/AR technologies are heavily involved in the transformation. In doing so they discovered a major barrier for entry for startups in the industry, this is due to factors such as legal preconditions and initial funding difficulties, both of which present major challenges. To break this barrier they analyzed several business models and finally identified a suitable one for OR Companion.
OR Companion is a project group for Clinical Health Technologies that stems from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing and Automation. The core of research and development activities of ORC aims at minimizing the complicacies that surgeons and their support personnel, such as nurses and medical technical assistants, encounter in the operating room, by applying robotic assistance systems and digital twins.
