Inclusive Innovation in Health Care

Why Does the Interdisciplinary Summer School Focus on
“Inclusive Innovation in Health Care”?

The world’s health care systems still face major challenges in the context of adequate utilization of health care and access to services, even in developed countries. Health outcomes vary across populations. Particular groups of people are less likley to receive routine medical procedures or high quality care services and have higher rates of mortality than others. Due to specific barriers, not all individuals are able to conduct a healthy lifestyle or receive an optimal disease treatment. Those factors can be related to gender, age, socio-economic status, area of residency (e.g., rural vs. urban), health literacy, and even religion.

With a specific focus on those who are disenfranchised from the tremendous benefit of medical progress, this Interdisciplinary Summer School engages in the discussion of the potential of inclusive innovation as a tool to overcome those barriers. Inclusive innovation is any process, product, or service that reaches the goal of reducing disparities or inequalities and leads to a wider outreach of medical progress.

Approaches to overcome the challenges for inclusive innovations are manifold. Starting at the health care system level, problems have to be analyzed. The health care system builds the framework or the eco-system for inclusiveness or exclusiveness. In addition, recent research revealed that medical innovations themselves might actually cause those disparities. Since medical technologies are an essential driver of health care costs, health care providers, and suppliers have started to focus on affordable health care equipment.

The access to medical innovation and services is addressed by initiatives that foster a shift of the point of care towards the patient. Through the use of new technologies and care models, services which were regularly provided by hospitals are now carried out by outpatient facilities, nurses, or even individually at home. Through this shift, patients who were formerly not able to receive treatment can now be treated or treat themselves remotely. A major driver of this development are telehealth or e-health services. The use of telecommunications technologies, smart monitoring devices, and easy-to-use treatment options allows the patient to interact with health care professionals and simultaneously stay independent.

Reading

The research field of inclusive innovation is still in its infancy. However, some interesting articles were currently published. Please find some recommended readings here:

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