Abstract
Healthcare innovation is impeded by high costs, the need for diverse skillsets, and complex regulatory processes. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical gaps in the current framework, especially those lying at the boundary between cutting-edge academic research and industry-scale manufacturing and production. While many resource-rich geographies were equipped with the required expertise to solve challenges posed by the pandemic, mechanisms to unite the appropriate institutions and scale up, fund, and mobilize solutions at a time-scale relevant to the emergency were lacking. We characterize the orthogonal spatial and temporal axes that dictate innovation. Improving on their limitations, we propose a “pre-emptive innovation infrastructure” incorporating in-house hospital innovation teams, consortia-based assembly of expertise, and novel funding mechanisms to combat future emergencies. By leveraging the strengths of academic, medical, government, and industrial institutions, this framework could improve ongoing innovation and supercharge the infrastructure for healthcare emergencies.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized that ongoing innovation in healthcare is critical to meeting arising needs
We propose a “pre-emptive innovation infrastructure” incorporating in-house hospital innovation teams, consortia-based assembly of expertise, and novel funding mechanisms to combat future emergencies
How can we enable active, widespread adoption of innovations, in a more convective fashion? We have glimpsed what such a process could look like in recent approvals of various COVID-19 vaccines and devices, where innovations backed by multiple stakeholders were able to penetrate the market quickly, having rapid, and widespread impact
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized that ongoing innovation in healthcare is critical to meeting arising needs. Drug development pipelines frequently take longer than a decade [3] While this pace pales in contrast to consumer technologies, it prevents spurious and poorly validated innovations from potentially harming patients. Successful innovation in health care requires three distinct steps: [1] inception, [2] implementation/testing, and [3] dissemination [4]. Diffusion is a passive process, where adoption varies significantly on individual perception [12]. While this represents the natural pathway in a free market, it makes healthcare innovation incredibly costly and challenging, at the cost of human life. While the complexity and requirements for each differ, their progression can be mapped onto this framework
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