Unleashing Healthcare Innovation at Scale

While the UK has an impressive track record in scientific discovery, a major obstacle has been translating those discoveries into innovations widely adopted and disseminated across the healthcare system. Overcoming this adoption challenge is crucial for driving improvements in care quality, access, and affordability.

Tricordant Director Alastair Mitchell-Baker gives his take on six key insights to unleash healthcare innovation at scale:

1. Create supportive regional ecosystems that foster collaboration across the entire “discover > develop > deploy” innovation pathway. Bring together universities, providers, government, and industry in coordinated partnerships. We worked with Universities and the NHS across Wessex to develop a business case for a new innovative regional approach for Wessex Health Partners.

2. Implement processes for signalling major healthcare delivery challenges to researchers so discoveries can be focused on solving those high-priority issues like managing primary care demand, caring for an ageing population with multiple chronic conditions, and addressing rising mental health needs.

3. Develop organisational capabilities and roles to identify, evaluate, and absorb new innovations into standard practice. Clinical academics, nurse consultants, allied health leaders and others can bridge the gap between research and real-world implementation.

4. Take an integrated system view of innovation costs and benefits. While initial investments may accrue to one area, the positive impacts are often dispersed across the entire care continuum.

5. Hardwire connections across clinical, operational, and financial leadership within emerging integrated care systems. Concentrated decision-making is required to back ambitious innovation adoption. 

6. Demand innovations be designed from the outset for seamless real-world adoption and dissemination, not just in controlled research settings. “Clinical utility” is as vital as clinical effectiveness.

Healthcare innovation has immense potential, but capturing those benefits at scale requires a coordinated approach—supportive ecosystems, prioritised challenges, absorptive capacity, a system-wide perspective, unified leadership, and real-world design. As leaders, advancing these priorities can revolutionise healthcare for all.

If you’d like to discuss this topic further, please get in touch.