Shutterstock
As health needs grow, it is imperative that innovation is at the frontier of change, to keep the health needs and requirements of the 21st century scalable. For innovation in health care to be sustained at an economically and fiscally responsible pace, it has to be a collaborative effort, requiring input from diverse stakeholders and key players in the industry. A collaborative health care system that includes information sharing, cross-industry cooperation and open innovation can lead to beneficial industry practices like cost reduction and time efficiency. Together, these practices set a precedent for growth and development at a more rapid pace.
An Efficient Method Of Doing Things
Toeing the line of technology advancements, innovation within the health care system has pioneered the development of cost-efficient, highly-optimized pragmatic solutions to many industry and individual health challenges. Artificial retinas, robotic nurses and gene therapy are just a few examples of plentiful recent innovations. These innovative technologies pose solutions to medical feats that, in the past, have overwhelmed medical practitioners, and thereby are expected to permit better health care delivery to patients and the global population. However, for these new advancements to be successfully implemented and established within the health care system, they must be met with collaboration and cooperation.
Creating A Synergistic Environment
Open, collective innovation like Project Data Sphere, designed to collate big data and bridge the distant segments of the health care industry, markup the necessity of innovation in the sector. In the case of Project Data Sphere, the goal is to facilitate the creation of a connected health care network bereft of the many loopholes characteristic of the system. Interoperability between key segments of the industry has always been a rate limiting factor. A unified platform capable of linking these segments together can have a significant impact on the sector.
Multiple companies are undertaking projects to build “cloud-based, big data platform” solutions that manage data to give the health industry the necessary edge it needs to manage itself. This ranges from cloud-based platforms powered by libraries of clinical, social and behavioral analytics utilized for sharing information across multiple hospitals, to using big data and advanced analytics for clinical improvements, financial analysis and fraud and waste monitoring.
Collaborating To Go Digital
Concurrent with the world’s continued adoption of digital technologies is the rapid expansion of the digital health care market — an expansion fostered by collaboration among global leaders of digital innovation in the health care industry. The partnership between major players in both the private and public sectors has engineered a growing list of innovative digital health care solutions.
Just last year an Israeli-based pharmaceutical company joined forces with Santa Clara, California-based Intel to develop wearables that routinely record and analyze symptoms of Huntington’s disease. The data collected is processed to help grade motor symptom severity associated with the disease.
Most times, singular organizations lack the human and financial resources to orchestrate grand schemes of innovation alone — but collaboration presents a practical route to overcoming the limitations that hinder novelty, leading to quicker turnarounds and advancements.
Scaling The Barriers To Innovation
If the push for innovation in the health care system is to thrive, then the complexities and obstacles that have continually stifled progress must be confronted. Aside from collaboration, other notable barriers to innovation include:
• The immediate return mentality: By default, most leaders show a preference for innovative solutions that offer immediate financial rewards. Innovative solutions with brighter prospects but long term financial incentives are in most instances placed on a back burner.
• Bureaucracy in the distributive network:Innovators have to wade through multiple third parties if they are to stand any chance of getting their products to the end user, a process that is not only daunting but financially implicative.
• Stringent regulatory practices: In addition to scaling through the bureaucracy, innovative solutions looking to make a market appearance have to pass several screenings, some of which have been tagged redundant by experts.
Innovation is a necessary tool in the health care sector that gives an essential boost to scale insurmountable obstacles and limitations. For health care to evolve into a more sophisticated and efficient system, cross-industry collaboration and inter-professional cooperation must become the norm.
You can read the original article here.
Source:
Pando A. (19 September 2017). “Collaborative Innovation Is Necessary To Advance In Health Care” [Web blog post]. Retrieved from address https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/09/19/collaborative-innovation-is-necessary-to-advance-in-health-care/2/#6743d07669c9