This platform has been developed with the collaboration, supervision and validation of its contents by more than 130 member organizations of the Enterprise Europe Network, a business cooperation network present in 60 countries around the world and which has been created and is supervised by the European Commission. As an exclusive partner and only contact point in Chile, the Eurochile Foundation opens the opportunity to join this platform to all actors in the health industry at the national level, from small to large companies, universities, associations, research center I R&D, hospitals, medical clinics and government organizations in the country.

As the Covid-19 pandemic progresses around the world, a series of initiatives to support health work are being carried out by governments, with the aim of sharing the experiences, products and services developed in different countries, both inside and outside the European Union. In this context, the European network -Enterprise Europe Network and Flanders Care – an initiative of the Flemish government – created a B2B platform to connect offers and demands with solutions and proposals that help combat the virus.

This platform will operate continuously until December 31, 2020, and seeks to gather available offers with the needs that emerge in the fight against the virus, share different knowledge and approaches, and give a vision of personalized support to the challenges of each region, bringing together the different actors working on this matter both in Europe and outside.

From our country, Eurochile Business Foundation, as an exclusive member of the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN), opens this online platform to the different organizations in the country that are actively seeking solutions that help combat COVID-19, allowing actors from health, industry, academia and government introduce their cooperation profile, inviting through it European counterparts to propose solutions already developed in the old continent, to join promising works that have place in Chile, or the joint search for solutions to particular problems.

“More as a marketplace, is integrated by more than 130 solid organizations – from more than 30 countries – that operate under the supervision of the European Commission. This implies a high standard  of validation and strict quality control for those who wish to operate within this platform, and also includes a process of accompaniment and help in solving problems for companies that wish to enter it. All this validation and support process, at national level, is carried out by Eurochile”, explains José Aravena, executive director of Eurochile Business Foundation.

Thanks to this validation process, the platform gathers and shows initiatives, offers and short-term needs; fosters interaction between health, industry, support organizations, government, academia, and others; and maximizes the reliability of the proposals presented.

The Care & Industry together against CORONA platform is grouped under different themes to facilitate contact between its members, and allows them to choose those areas for which they have or need a solution, and to find a partner for discussions and move on. For each region, you can also find support service organizations in the market.

Among the main thematic areas of the platform are consumer goods (prevention, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation); diagnosis (biomedical and medical technology); emergency medicine and rescue teams; hospital and care equipment; hygiene, sterilization and disinfection; images and information technologies.

To the date, the network brings together 550 participants from practically all European countries and Taiwan, among which are 355 SMEs, 39 large companies, 27 universities, 35 R&D institutions, 19 associations and 11 hospitals, which together they provide 1131 profiles of opportunities in areas such as products, society, services, investment and cooperation projects. This number of participants will continue to increase in the coming days and weeks.

Products offered, for example, range from companies manufacturing facial visors for sanitary protection to devices that allow you to open a door handle with your forearm to reduce the risk of direct contact with viruses and bacteria.

Regarding cooperation projects, there are from the design of personal protective equipment for general medical procedures in patients with Covid-19 to supply the low availability of these in the market, to projects that seek to create a pulmonary rehabilitation device for patients with prolonged coronavirus intubation, which offers both mechanical and electronic design and programming (application, integrated firmware, IoT and cloud).

There are also associative initiatives that seek partners for future R&D collaborations in healthcare and related fields. For example, Red de Institutos Tecnológicos Comunidad Valenciana (REDIT) seeks to take advantage of the deep knowledge they have now acquired about the certification and manufacture of fans and masks, ICT tools, 3D printing of protective equipment, AI for diagnosis and safety of sanitary respirators, among other fields of action.

How to register and participate

To register and participate in this platform, you must enter the following link: https://care-industry-together-against-corona.b2match.io/how-it-works

Complete and describe a concise and clear profile in English in order to give visibility to your offer or demand; you must indicate who you are, where you are from and what type of partner you are looking for and for what specific sector. It is important to note that if you have R&D services, products or projects, these must be entered as different profiles. If you do not complete the process of the profile upload, it will not appear on the matchmaking platform and you will not be able to participate.

Your profile will be reviewed and validated by Eurochile in order to meet the standards and criteria requested by the platform; otherwise your profile will not be activated or may be rejected. After completing this process, you will receive an email with the steps to follow, and you will be able to review the profiles of the other participants as well as request and accept or reject meetings that will be requested of you. The platform will remain open until December 31.

For more information, please contact Manuela Caruz mcaruz@eurochile.cl