Innovation to improve healthcare performance

What is it about?

Most healthcare systems face great challenges to provide cost-effective services to patients in a way that engages healthcare professionals and involve patients. We suggest that enabling healthcare professionals and related stakeholders to more easily become entrepreneurs by introducing innovations in healthcare is a way to meet these challenges. We therefore study conditions for introducing innovation in the Stockholm healthcare system and identified a set of blocking mechanisms to innovation that should be addressed to improve conditions for innovation. The most important blocking mechanisms were an insufficient understanding for the inherent uncertainty to innovation and the need for entrepreneurship among healthcare professionals to address uncertainties proactively. This insufficent understanding for the need of entrepreneurship in healthcare is captured in the linear view of innovation where research and guidelines are 'only implemented' into practice without acknowledging problems in gaining resources, understanding needs and changing processes to make innovations work in clinical practice. Procurement is often done without reflecting on deeper needs and how to solve them. HTA units tend to dismiss innovations based on insufficient evidence instead of supporting generation of evidence. Further, involvement of patients is an underutilized resource in innovation.

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Why is it important?

For healthcare to become a place for healthcare professionals to be engaged instead of alienated - innovation and entrepreneurship must be seen as a fundamental activity of their professional activities. Unfortunately, the way healthcare is managed today provides little room for professionals to experiment and improve practice. Instead they are managed according to production targets and given little room to improve things which result in reduced engagement and motivation.

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