Projects
Patient-Driven Innovations in Spine Care
Enuval draws upon the experience and engages those with spine conditions to support our active research portfolio. We have multiple projects in different stages of development and are continuously in dialogue with our contributors to develop new, high-impact ideas. Here, we highlight a few projects we are most excited about.
In many countries, particularly low and middle-income countries, patients and their families have to purchase their own screws and rods for spinal surgery. One of our contributors, Kelly, faced this exact challenge when she needed spine surgery in Venezuela. Her family was instructed on what to buy and how to buy it in a process with significant country-to-country variation. Enuval has found that patients globally often face enormous barriers to accessing implants for needed surgeries, and we have worked to better describe these barriers toward overcoming them in the future. Learn more here.
In some countries, regulatory organizations exist to help evaluate quality (e.g., the United States has the FDA). However, in other countries, gaps in regulation exist. This issue arose during our project looking at implant access, inspired by Kelly’s story about sourcing implants for her spine surgery. We found in looking at issues of implant access, good quality information about implant quality may be lacking to help patients when they purchase their own implants for surgery. Enuval’s goal is to address this gap in information about quality by testing the strength of screw and rod combinations sourced globally and then making this information available to patients and their surgeons. Learn more here.
Inspired by the outpouring of interest in this topic during co-founder Martha Hunt’s pregnancy, Enuval is exploring the effects of scoliosis throughout pregnancy and postpartum. At this stage, we are gathering input from our contributors about the issues during pregnancy and postpartum that affected them most significantly. Learn more here.
One of Enuval’s core goals is to involve those affected by spine conditions in research that directly affects them. Many of our contributors, like Rumeysa, have been the subjects of research but have never been involved in actually performing research. We want to change this by allowing our contributors to own their medical information and then use it at will to collaborate with others on research. Learn more here.
