The Nova Scotia Health Authority will organize five startup pitch competitions this year, aimed at identifying new technologies to help address growing problems faced by the provincial medical system.

Announced Friday during an event at the Volta innovation hub, the first Health Challenge event is slated for April 8 and will feature medtech businesses focused on cancer treatment.  

The new initiative comes as Nova Scotia struggles to modernize aging and understaffed healthcare infrastructure that is projected to consume more than 40 per cent of this year’s $11.6 billion provincial budget.

“We’re going to benefit from the fact that different people coming from different perspectives bring different ways of thinking to these problems,” said Health Authority president and CEO Dr. Brendan Carr at the event. “We’ve reached the point where just simply improving on what we’re doing is actually not sufficient. We actually need to generate new solutions to these old problems.”

The competing companies must be based in one of the four Atlantic Provinces and offer a biotech or medtech product that has received all relevant regulatory approvals in Canada. The winners of the first pitch competition will receive $100,000 and their product will be considered for adoption by the province. You can find more information on applying here. The deadline is March 25.

The prize money will be provided by a group of non-government partners that so-far includes Volta, life sciences industry association BioNova, the QEII Health Sciences Centre Foundation and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, or ACOA. Volta will also host the competitions.

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Dr. Gail Tomblin Murphy, vice president of research, innovation and discovery, and chief nurse executive for the Nova Scotia Health Authority, said  the other four pitch competitions were originally planned to also have $100,000 prizes, but the level of interest expressed by the private sector could open the door to larger purses.

Carr said the first competition will target cancer because Atlantic Canada has higher-than-average cancer rates. According to Statistics Canada, Nova Scotia has the third-highest number of cancer diagnoses per-capita in the country, trailing only Newfoundland and Labrador, and Ontario.

Tomblin Murphy added that the pitch competitions will become part of a broader push to innovate how Nova Scotians interact with their medical system. Spending will be targeted at areas of particular need that the government has already identified as part of a broader planning process, such as hip and knee replacements.

“There are key areas of focus from our end,” she said. “And these are really based on needs that are identified through health surveys, through the patient and family profiles and data that we collect on an ongoing basis, as well as information from our providers.”