Investing in Health Innovation: A Cornerstone to Achieving Global Health Convergence

Healthcare can't stop evolving: innovation as the catalyst for unleashing the managerial potential of value-based healthcare by stimulating intangible assets and enhancing organizational resilience

Background

With increasing healthcare service utilization and the introduction of costly therapies, healthcare organizations are pressured to deliver cost-effective services within constrained budgets. Rising costs and the need for efficient healthcare delivery are major concerns for governments, insurers, and health plans.

Objectives

It aims to understand the impact of these intangible assets on creating value and organizational resilience in healthcare, informing better practices and strategies for VBHC implementation.

Methods

An applied research approach using the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) methodology was adopted. The research was divided into seven interconnected Work Packages (WPs), each designed to investigate different aspects of the integration between VBHC and intangible assets, with a focus on enhancing organizational resilience through innovative health processes. Key methodologies included literature reviews and qualitative analyses, employing Open Innovation and Design Thinking.

Results

The study revealed a dynamic interplay between VBHC, organizational resilience, and intangible assets. It showed that managerial effectiveness is influenced by direct patient outcomes and elements like intellectual capital and organizational reputation. Data integration from various Work Packages provided new insights into how intangible assets underpin VBHC strategies, proposing novel management approaches. Findings highlight the essential role of intangible assets in enhancing service delivery and fostering sustainable healthcare practices.

Discussion

The study highlights a significant oversight in the integration of intangible assets within healthcare organizations, despite their crucial role in optimizing VBHC. It supports literature emphasizing the importance of intellectual capital and organizational culture in enhancing healthcare management efficiency and resilience. A paradigm shift in VBHC to include these assets is needed for building a more adaptable and sustainable healthcare system. This integration can lead to better clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, and overall healthcare efficiency, aligning more closely with VBHC goals.

Conclusion

Recognizing and effectively managing intangible assets are paramount for the successful implementation of VBHC and enhanced organizational resilience. Strategic integration of these assets into healthcare management practices can significantly improve patient outcomes and create a more sustainable, patient-centered, and resilient healthcare system. Future studies should develop methodologies for robust measurement and integration of these assets to fully realize the potential of VBHC.

User Participation in Coproduction of Health Innovation: Proposal for a Synergy Project

Background

This project concerns advancing knowledge, methods, and logic for user participation in coproduction of health innovations. Such advancement is vital for several reasons. From a user perspective, participation in coproduction provides an opportunity to gain real influence over goal definition, design, and implementation of health innovations, ensuring that the solution developed solves real problems in right ways. From a societal perspective, it’s a mean to improve the efficiency of health care and the implementation of the Patient Act. As for industry, frameworks and knowledge of coproduction offer tools to operate in a complex sector, with great potential for innovation of services and products.

Objective

The fundamental objective of this project is to advance knowledge and methods of how user participation in the coproduction of health innovations can be applied in order to benefit users, industry, and public sector.

Methods

This project is a synergy project, which means that the objective will be accomplished through collaboration and meta-analysis between three subprojects that address different user groups, apply different strategies to promote human health, and relate to different parts of the health sector. Furthermore, subprojects focus on distinctive stages in the spectrum of innovation, with the objective to generate knowledge of the innovation process as a whole. The project is organized around three work packages related to three challenges—coproduction, positioning, and realization. Each subproject is designed such that it has its own field of study with clearly identified objectives but also targets work packages to contribute to the project as a whole. The work on the work packages will use case methodology for data collection and analysis based on the subprojects as data sources. More concretely, logic of multiple case studies will be applied with each subproject representing a separate case which is similar to each other in its attention to user participation in coproduction, but different regarding, for example, context and target groups. At the synergy level, the framework methodology will be used to handle and analyze the vast amount of information generated within the subprojects.

Results

The project period is from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2022.

Conclusions

By addressing the objective of this project, we will create new knowledge on how to manage challenges to health innovation associated with the coproduction process, the positioning of solutions, and realization.

Metazoan Parasite Vaccines: Present Status and Future Prospects

Eukaryotic parasites and pathogens continue to cause some of the most detrimental and difficult to treat diseases (or disease states) in both humans and animals, while also continuously expanding into non-endemic countries. Combined with the ever growing number of reports on drug-resistance and the lack of effective treatment programs for many metazoan diseases, the impact that these organisms will have on quality of life remain a global challenge. Vaccination as an effective prophylactic treatment has been demonstrated for well over 200 years for bacterial and viral diseases. From the earliest variolation procedures to the cutting edge technologies employed today, many protective preparations have been successfully developed for use in both medical and veterinary applications. In spite of the successes of these applications in the discovery of subunit vaccines against prokaryotic pathogens, not many targets have been successfully developed into vaccines directed against metazoan parasites. With the current increase in -omics technologies and metadata for eukaryotic parasites, target discovery for vaccine development can be expedited. However, a good understanding of the host/vector/pathogen interface is needed to understand the underlying biological, biochemical and immunological components that will confer a protective response in the host animal. Therefore, systems biology is rapidly coming of age in the pursuit of effective parasite vaccines. Despite the difficulties, a number of approaches have been developed and applied to parasitic helminths and arthropods. This review will focus on key aspects of vaccine development that require attention in the battle against these metazoan parasites, as well as successes in the field of vaccine development for helminthiases and ectoparasites. Lastly, we propose future direction of applying successes in pursuit of next generation vaccines.

Medical innovation and the sustainability of health systems: A historical perspective on technological change in health

New medical technology challenges the sustainability of healthcare systems in several countries. Drawing on secondary sources of data, the aim of this article is to generate a better understanding of the historical Research & Development dynamics that have contributed to shape today’s medical innovation ecosystem. We describe key technological achievements along three historical periods – the 1950s, the 1980s and the 2000s – and situate them within their broader political, social, cultural and economic contexts. Our analyses bring forward self-reinforcing dynamics between technology, medical specialization, individualization of disease and the concentration of resources in academic teaching centres. We argue that the way medical innovation has been financed, designed and commercialized since the 1950s has engendered path dependency, which exacerbates the sustainability challenges healthcare systems are now facing. We conclude on the need for innovation design principles that could protect the sustainability of healthcare systems.