Planning an innovation marathon at an infectious disease conference with results from the International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance 2016 Hackathon

The role of open innovation in addressing resource constraints in healthcare: a systematic literature review

PURPOSE

The resource crisis in healthcare can be alleviated by engaging external stakeholders and resources in healthcare delivery. The authors use value and open innovation concepts to understand what motivates the stakeholders to join the healthcare innovation ecosystem and what value such an ecosystem brings to healthcare.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH

A systematic literature review following the PRISMA framework method was applied to reach the research objective. Out of a total of 509 identified articles published till 2021, 25 were selected as relevant for this review.

FINDINGS

Six categories of actors were identified, including innovation intermediaries, which were so far neglected in the healthcare innovation literature. Furthermore, patients, healthcare providers, innovation suppliers, investors and influencers were described. The authors also distinguished internal and external stakeholders. The authors show why and how open innovation projects contribute to involving external stakeholders and resources in healthcare delivery by contributing to patient autonomy, relationship building, knowledge transfer, improving collaborative mindset and culture, advancing know-how and bringing additional finances.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE

This article is the first one to systematically describe the value of open innovation in healthcare. The authors challenge the positivist approach in value presented by value-based healthcare. The authors show how openness contributes to addressing the resource crisis by involving new stakeholders and resources in the care delivery process.

Digital health for climate change mitigation and response: a scoping review

OBJECTIVE

Climate change poses a major threat to the operation of global health systems, triggering large scale health events, and disrupting normal system operation. Digital health may have a role in the management of such challenges and in greenhouse gas emission reduction. This scoping review explores recent work on digital health responses and mitigation approaches to climate change.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We searched Medline up to February 11, 2022, using terms for digital health and climate change. Included articles were categorized into 3 application domains (mitigation, infectious disease, or environmental health risk management), and 6 technical tasks (data sensing, monitoring, electronic data capture, modeling, decision support, and communication). The review was PRISMA-ScR compliant.

RESULTS

The 142 included publications reported a wide variety of research designs. Publication numbers have grown substantially in recent years, but few come from low- and middle-income countries. Digital health has the potential to reduce health system greenhouse gas emissions, for example by shifting to virtual services. It can assist in managing changing patterns of infectious diseases as well as environmental health events by timely detection, reducing exposure to risk factors, and facilitating the delivery of care to under-resourced areas.

DISCUSSION

While digital health has real potential to help in managing climate change, research remains preliminary with little real-world evaluation.

CONCLUSION

Significant acceleration in the quality and quantity of digital health climate change research is urgently needed, given the enormity of the global challenge.

To other new educational ways for interdisciplinary cooperation and innovation: about a student-driven hackathon

Background: Innovation in healthcare cannot be conceived without an interdisciplinary approach. Hackathons are an innovative approach to promote team working and demonstrated an interest in higher education through inquiry-based learning. An interdisciplinary team of students and young professionals organized the first hybrid presential and online neurorehabilitation hackathon, within the joined 2020 WCNR-SOFMER congress, adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Interdisciplinary teams worked during two days on concrete issues met by people with a disability and their caregivers, accompanied by multi-skilled mentors to create tangible solutions. An independent jury selected the winning project. Results: HRL met the expectations of 96% of the 31 participants. They reported better knowledge and ability about teamwork, ethics, and patient-centered approaches. Conclusions: HRL allowed the creation of a strong interdisciplinary and international network which will be valuable to foster innovation. It demonstrated its value in the junior and students’ training for teamwork, communication, creativity in innovation, and ethics in health.

Grass-roots entrepreneurship complements traditional top-down innovation in lung and breast cancer

The majority of biomedical research is funded by public, governmental, and philanthropic grants. These initiatives often shape the avenues and scope of research across disease areas. However, the prioritization of disease-specific funding is not always reflective of the health and social burden of each disease. We identify a prioritization disparity between lung and breast cancers, whereby lung cancer contributes to a substantially higher socioeconomic cost on society yet receives significantly less funding than breast cancer. Using search engine results and natural language processing (NLP) of Twitter tweets, we show that this disparity correlates with enhanced public awareness and positive sentiment for breast cancer. Interestingly, disease-specific venture activity does not correlate with funding or public opinion. We use outcomes from recent early-stage innovation events focused on lung cancer to highlight the complementary mechanism by which bottom-up “grass-roots” initiatives can identify and tackle under-prioritized conditions.

Implementing the Co-Immune Open Innovation Program to Address Vaccination Hesitancy and Access to Vaccines: Retrospective Study

Background

The rise of major complex public health problems, such as vaccination hesitancy and access to vaccination, requires innovative, open, and transdisciplinary approaches. Yet, institutional silos and lack of participation on the part of nonacademic citizens in the design of solutions hamper efforts to meet these challenges. Against this background, new solutions have been explored, with participatory research, citizen science, hackathons, and challenge-based approaches being applied in the context of public health.

Objective

Our aim was to develop a program for creating citizen science and open innovation projects that address the contemporary challenges of vaccination in France and around the globe.

Methods

We designed and implemented Co-Immune, a program created to tackle the question of vaccination hesitancy and access to vaccination through an online and offline challenge-based open innovation approach. The program was run on the open science platform Just One Giant Lab.

Results

Over a 6-month period, the Co-Immune program gathered 234 participants of diverse backgrounds and 13 partners from the public and private sectors. The program comprised 10 events to facilitate the creation of 20 new projects, as well as the continuation of two existing projects, to address the issues of vaccination hesitancy and access, ranging from app development and data mining to analysis and game design. In an open framework, the projects made their data, code, and solutions publicly available.

Conclusions

Co-Immune highlights how open innovation approaches and online platforms can help to gather and coordinate noninstitutional communities in a rapid, distributed, and global way toward solving public health issues. Such initiatives can lead to the production and transfer of knowledge, creating novel solutions in the public health sector. The example of Co-Immune contributes to paving the way for organizations and individuals to collaboratively tackle future global challenges.

Idea Generation Through Hackathon Event in Emergencies and Disasters, with Emphasis on Managing Flash Flood Disaster

OBJECTIVE

This study was intended to demonstrate the applicability of the hackathon in idea generation for managing emergencies and disasters with a particular focus on flash floods.

METHODS

A 4-day hackathon event was held, having 60 students, 9 mentors and 6 judges gathered to explore different ideas, and to solve problems of Iran flooding from mid-March to April, 2019. Of these, 10 teams with 6 students were accordingly formed to brainstorm and discuss the idea, while 9 mentors offered advice and guided them to manage their ideas. Then, all teams focused on designing their business models. Finally, the hackathon teams finalized their lean canvas and presented their ideas to the judging panel and the other participants.

RESULTS

A total of 10 ideas were presented, and based on the knowledge and experience of the judges, 3 ideas that were more practical and useful were selected.

CONCLUSIONS

As participants in a hackathon identify and present real-world problems, while ensuring that the prototype solutions address the end-user's needs, it could be used to drive innovation, generate ideas, promote change in emergencies and disasters, and can increase our preparedness for future events. It helps us to develop tools and applications to better respond to these events.

Health diplomacy through health entrepreneurship: using hackathons to address Palestinian-Israeli health concerns

The universally shared values of improving health and well-being of populations make health a suitable diplomacy tool that transcends populations. The role of entrepreneurship in improving health and contributing to sustainable development is increasingly used in conjunction with traditional health diplomacy. In this paper, we present healthcare entrepreneurship as an effective health diplomacy tool that can spur economic growth, improve healthcare and generate sustainable development in communities. Improvements in health require involvement of diverse stakeholders including healthcare and non-health professionals to generate and implement sustainable problem-focused solutions. We illustrate the utility of early-stage innovation events, such as hackathons, in sparking entrepreneurship, interdisciplinary collaboration, ideation and innovation around problems specific to a local community. Specifically, we describe a hackathon organised in Nazareth, Israel as a means to bridge multicultural communities to address common health issues across the population. We suggest that health entrepreneurship is an important component of health diplomacy, and a critical ingredient for improved health, economic growth and sustainable development.