Turning good ideas into practical solutions: health care innovation ecosystems
A trade mission from the Netherlands, joined by?Ernst Kuipers, the Dutch Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport, visited Minneapolis and Chicago recently. As part of?Medical Alley, Minneapolis leads all other US clusters in patents specific to medical devices. Founded in 1984 and renown as MedTech cluster, Medical Alley is now a global organisation with 800+ partner organisations focusing on activating and amplifying health care transformation.
As?reported?by the Dutch Minister, he and others visited Medtronic, Philips and Abbott for their innovative ideas to address workforce challenges in health care and to make health care more sustainable. In light of the ‘Green Deal: Working together towards sustainable healthcare’, a set of agreements between numerous stakeholders in the Dutch health care system, it is indeed interesting to explore how other health care (eco)systems bring about the needed transition to health care with minimal impact on climate and the environment.?This is especially the case when recognising the complex, interdependent nature of challenges and hence the need to collaborate, think and act out of the box to truly transform health care.
One question which comes to mind is whether the Minister and the trade mission visited some of the largest companies in MedTech or the MedTech?ecosystem, to learn how innovation partnerships can flourish. For the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport it becomes increasingly important to have a vibrant connection to the larger?health care ecosystem. In doing so, it is important for to?build the capacity?to understand the ecosystem, the capacity to respond to an ever-evolving ecosystem, and the capacity to structure itself in response to its ecosystem. With the American innovation ecosystem for MedTech characterised in 2015 as ‘an ecosystem under stress’, it is interesting to see what policy changes can vitalize medical technology innovation while achieving other goals. For example, agreeing on common data standards, aggregating investment funds, and incentives for providers to adapt new technology all are relevant conditions for a?health care ecosystem?to reach its purpose.?
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Turning good ideas into practical solutions is key for all health care systems. However, with an average time lag of 17 years between research evidence and clinical practice, we call for the use of (more) implementation research to promote innovation translation. The goal of?implementation research?is primarily to understand the processes, barriers and facilitators across multiple contextual levels that affect implementation success, and to develop and test implementation strategies to increase the uptake of an innovation by overcoming barriers and/or enhance the facilitators. Moreover, efforts to incorporate implementation science into the?health care innovation ecosystem?should continue to be expanded and strengthened.