Overcoming Adoption Challenges in Healthcare for Societal Benefit

BIN@Sheffield2017 Meeting Report

The Business Innovation Network (or BIN) is holding its annual meeting in Sheffield this week. This is an unusual event in that it seeks to stimulate economic growth and wider societal benefits by harnessing the specific-but-often-disparate strengths of a city and region, in particular the academic base. I had the privilege of attending a morning dedicated to medical, dental and social challenges, and chaired the session on overcoming barriers to adoption in healthcare. My experienced speakers - who kindly  also formed a panel for a lengthy Q&A session - were Keith Jackson (CEO of 8-Q and former MD of JRI Ltd.), Jason Brannan (Communications Director for Y&H Medilink), and Fernando Monteiro (Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Porto).  While some of the more obvious issues were raised and discussed, there were also some points that were less predictable and therefore worth capturing on this blog.  Those that struck me included:

• Regulations are essential for patient protection and a cornerstone of responsible innovation. While the new medical devices regulations were undoubtedly going to stress our industry (with a heightened risk of losing businesses that manufacture excellent products), there were also some benefits beyond increased patient safety. Firstly, innovation would need to make a demonstrable difference before it could be placed on the market. Secondly, the new regulations also presented new business opportunities. My previous two blog posts deal with the new regulations and responsible innovation.

• One good example of an emerging business opportunity is the translation of in silico modelling for use as a real tool for validating medical devices or drugs as a part of a comprehensive pre-clinical screening and testing programme. Tremendous academic progress has been demonstrated by groups such as Insigneo in Sheffield, but the attractiveness to industry of this work will be increased by the inclusion of modelling in the new medical devices directives (and parallel developments at the FDA).  The development of sound, validated modelling tools will therefore assist both the development of healthcare technologies and their passage to the market.

• The final point made by the panel was that it was possible that some contemporary healthcare solutions were potentially over-engineered (and therefore costly). New approaches were needed to determine which solutions were “good enough” in terms of delivering a satisfactory and cost-effective result without compromising quality of life. The innovation community is already complex, but there is a case for bringing together even more multi-skilled teams to tackle challenges that have reached new levels of complexity.

Wider changes and the huge scale of the healthcare challenge suggests that societies will need to find new ways of covering the costs (and risks) of translating from the laboratory to the clinic.  Multi-disciplinary partnerships with private and public sector entities will be increasingly attractive as a means of sharing risks and costs, with some degree of government engagement and involvement. These could be all the more successful if city and regional councils can work together to strengthen the environment or “place” where innovation is developed and tested.  We will perhaps see the rise of new not-for-profit entities to act as umbrella organisations that address the more complex healthcare challenges. City regions that best understand and support these changes will benefit from the high value jobs and economic growth that the healthcare industry will deliver.