Fortunately, the UK is rich in exceptional innovators who are all inspired to work diligently to improve the health of our population and the care services that support us when most needed. Yet only a fraction of the innovation we develop makes it into the mainstream of services, despite almost all of it having proven clinical and service value. Why is that? What can innovators do to land their work more effectively so that everyone benefits, including UK PLC?
At the 2024 HETT show, UK’s leading event for healthcare technology, we ran a workshop with the Health Innovation Network to consider this very issue from the perspectives of commissioners and providers of services, so that we could help innovators to develop products and services that could be adopted more easily in the NHS, Social Care and beyond. We asked delegates to reflect on innovation they had been exposed to, but not yet adopted, and to reflect on what it would take to move forward - or share views on why work might not get any traction in the market. The discussion was very insightful, and 3 key pieces of advice were suggested:
- Focus on Benefits:
Show an in-year return on investment aligned to a funding stream – so you can prove benefits and show how your work could be funded. This can be difficult, particularly when the clinical outcomes you are aiming for will be delivered across generations, as the goal is to deliver societal well-being and enable care services to be sustainable. Innovators are often very good at making the long-term case for what they do, however they could do more to show greater impact sooner.
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Be a Priority and Collaborate:
Make it worth it – sometimes the impact of innovation might be small, difficult to achieve and so difficult to procure that it may not be simply isn’t worth the effort to push the work to the front of the never-ending queue of priorities. Being the most fashionable solution in an exhibition space is not enough. It is more important to nail the value-proposition in order to stand out So much innovation is a variation on a theme, delivering a small percentage of additional benefits over something that already exists, but not enough of a benefit to differentiate.
One way of overcoming the challenge of differentiation is to find partners whose solutions are complementary to yours. Walking the floor at HETT there was a sense that if organisation X worked with organisation Y then they could create a really compelling joint proposition. For example,, we saw product companies with great products and no services capability - and vice versa.
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Have a Convincing Delivery Approach:
Show how the work can be delivered and offer services which help your idea land safely and quickly. You might live and breathe the innovation which inspires you to work harder every day. However, the change you are trying to inspire will not necessarily come easily to staff, patients, service users and the wider population. It may be the case that, for your benefit to be realised, there is a cost to implementing your solution somewhere else in the care system and managing the dependencies may be difficult.
The group we consulted with saw lots of solutions that they admired but only one solution which they felt they could implement immediately which had:
The Health Innovation Network find, test and implement innovations that address unmet needs within the health and care system. There are 15 health innovation networks across England are embedded in local health innovation ecosystems and collaborate with academics, industry: from startups to multinationals and local healthcare teams. IQVIA have the industry partnership capability and real-world experience to help you round out your proposition and deliver it at scale. We also have our own incubation scheme, details of which are available on request.
To learn more about the work of IQVIA and some of the detail behind this post, please do contact Paul Henderson, Consulting Director, IQVIA at paul.henderson@iqvia.com