To evaluate the viability and impact of South Korea’s inaugural Military-Civilian Partnership (MCP) pilot program in overcoming peacetime volume deficits and enhancing military clinical readiness.

Over a 1-year period (September 2024-August 2025), an active-duty military surgeon maintained regular duties at a military facility, completing 65 shifts, while performing 41 intermittent 24-hour shifts at a civilian regional trauma center (RTC). The patient demographics, injury severity, and procedural/surgical volumes of the surgeon’s cases were retrospectively analyzed.

The surgeon managed 103 and 193 patients at the military facility and civilian RTC, respectively. The civilian RTC presented a significantly higher burden of severe trauma, with more patients presenting with Injury Severity Score (ISS) >9 (49% vs 35%, P = 0.023) and ISS >15 (35% vs 23%, P = 0.035). While the civilian RTC provided a higher volume of invasive procedures (142 vs 23) and complex visceral repairs, the military facility uniquely exposed the surgeon to military-specific mechanisms (gunshots, blasts) and preserved baseline dexterity through unrestricted general surgery access.

These results suggest that a tailored, intermittent MCP model effectively sustains military clinical readiness by blending high-density civilian trauma exposure with military-specific trauma care.

Startup companies in the healthcare sector often fail because they lack sufficient entrepreneurial, regulatory, and business development expertise. Maturity models provide useful frameworks to assess the state of business elements more systematically than heuristic assessments. However, previous models were developed primarily to characterize the business state of larger nonmedical companies. A maturity index designed specifically for startup companies in the medical product sector could help to identify areas in which targeted interventions could assist business development.

A novel MedTech Startup Maturity Index (SMI) was developed by a collaborative team of academic and industry experts and refined through feedback from external stakeholders. Pediatric medical device startups associated with the West Coast Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP) were scored and ranked according to the SMI following semi-structured interviews. The CTIP executive team independently ranked the maturity of each company based on their extensive experiences with the same companies.

SMI scores for 16 companies ranged from 1.2 to 3.8 out of 4. These scores were well aligned with heuristic CTIP rankings for 14 out of 16 companies, reflected by strong correlations between the two datasets (Spearman’s rho = 0.721, P = 0.002, and Kendall’s tau-b = 0.526, P = 0.006).

The SMI yields maturity scores that correlate well with expert rankings but can be assessed without prior company knowledge and can identify specific areas of concern more systematically. Further research is required to generalize and validate the SMI as a pre-/post-evaluation tool.