EIT Health’s CEO, Jean-Marc Bourez, looks ahead to a year of innovation in healthcare.
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Outlook for 2023
Last May in partnership with the Karolinska Institutet, EIT Health co-hosted our flagship event, the EIT Health 2022 Summit in Stockholm. Joined by experts spanning the vast spectrum of the healthcare and the life sciences sector, we reflected on the major developments across the European healthcare space and considered the biggest innovations and developments that promised to disrupt the system as we know it.
As we welcome 2023 and mark almost three years since the World Health Organisation officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, it feels timely to reflect on the biggest trends and developments that we, at EIT Health, believe are due to change the healthcare landscape in 2023 and beyond.
1. Demand for Digital Medical Devices (DMDs)
2023 will no doubt, see further developments across the digital landscape as innovators, entrepreneurs, and academics look towards the transformative potential of digital medical devices (DMDs) across the health and medical arenas. The solutions being explored by EIT Health-funded start-ups and project consortia are among the many examples of ground-breaking DMDs that have the potential to reimagine the way that healthcare is delivered and improve the everyday lives of patients.
Yet, a fragmented regulatory landscape serves as an obstacle preventing promising DMDs from taking root and delivering real-life changes. Evidence requirements for reimbursement decisions and specifications of clinical trials differ from country to country, amounting to financial and regulatory hurdles that restrict the widespread uptake of DMDs.
Despite these hurdles, patients and medical professionals will undoubtedly demonstrate their desire to ensure that we continue to maintain the focus towards digitally based healthcare solutions effectively integrated systemically, and that momentum is not lost in their uptake and utility. To facilitate the digital revolution and address these demands, key stakeholders from business, policy and medicine, convening in fora such as the European Taskforce for Harmonised Evaluation of DMDs will join forces to harmonise approval procedures for DMDs across the EU.
2. Impetus to upskill and reskill
With accelerated innovation in healthcare comes an inevitable need to invest in upskilling healthcare professionals. The changes across the healthcare industry will give way to new, specialised roles and require professionals to be equipped with specific skillsets to effectively adapt to new ways of working.
Across the continent, there is apparent and ever-increasing talent shortage and skills gap in the healthcare space. Without addressing this vulnerability in our healthcare system, the innovation and progress already made throughout the field will become potentially redundant, and the healthcare systems we build will struggle to be sustainable and resilient.
Industry stakeholders are confronting this reality to ensure that current and future generations of healthcare professionals are well-prepared to address the unique demands of a modernising sector. From the EU’s New European Innovation Agenda to EIT Health’s WorkInHealth Foundation, promising work is being done to combat the skills gap and talent shortage in the industry.
In 2023, we can expect to see more industry actors that will follow suit and commit to upskilling and reskilling the healthcare workforce across Europe.
3. Heightened recognition of new models to deliver healthcare
In 2023, I believe that our conceptualisation of healthcare will evolve. We will continue to redefine new models to deliver healthcare, placing an increased emphasis on the concept of value-based healthcare.
Measuring value based on patient outcomes and shifting the paradigm from treatment to prevention sits at the heart of value-based healthcare, something that has been recognised for many years now. This model of healthcare, geared towards delivering better health outcomes that matter to patients, is ultimately instrumental in tackling the healthcare systemic inefficiencies associated with our current model of healthcare delivery.
This year, we will witness an increasing volume of healthcare providers across Europe shifting away from fee-for-service care to value-based care, whereby the quality and effectiveness of patient interventions will become the most important metrics of success. The benefits of recentering patient value in our model of delivery are numerous, but most importantly, patient outcomes will improve with effective, efficient treatment and healthcare systems will benefit through less wasteful use of resources.
Overall, patients and providers alike, increasingly recognise that foregrounding the value of care is critical to bolstering the sustainability and resilience of our systems, whilst, crucially, enhancing patient wellbeing. 2023 will see society adapting and adjusting to accommodate this evolving concept of care.
4. Patients will take greater ownership over their own care
Patients are becoming more and more well-informed and empowered. As a result, we will see patients showing greater autonomy as they look to shape their care and treatment experiences. This development will lend itself to the rise in patient-designed innovation.
EIT Health has seen that patient-designed innovations can offer competitive advantages compared to their market peers. Namely, solutions co-developed with patients with a first-hand understanding of a given condition tend to be better suited towards holistically and effectively addressing the specific, lived experiences of individuals. When patients are empowered to innovate, the resulting solutions have greater potential to improve health outcomes and change lives for the better.
Better health outcomes resulting from targeted, effective patient-led innovations, can have the knock-on benefit of reducing costs associated with less effective and less integrable interventions. Embedding patient insights into the design of health solutions is, therefore, vital, not only given the potential of boosting patient outcomes but also as a vehicle for driving cost efficiencies in our system.
Given the undoubted value of patient-driven innovation, we can expect to see increased focus in patient-designed solutions in 2023.
5. Building trust and harnessing the power of health data
With the development of the European Health Data Space (EHDS), we can continue to expect sustained momentum on harnessing the full potential of health data for innovation.
Health data is a necessary asset in the healthcare industry, offering wide-ranging benefits from improving the accuracy of diagnoses and treatment decisions to fuelling research and innovation and informing policymaking.
As the EHDS matures, and as patients and providers increasingly understand the critical advantages of data as a means of delivering life-changing solutions, we can expect to see enhanced stakeholder cooperation to develop a sophisticated and secure data-sharing infrastructure that facilitates the movement of health data across borders.
We are already on our way to building effective data-sharing practices. In May 2022, the European Commission proposed the EHDS Regulation aiming to remedy the “situation of fragmentation” in existing data-sharing infrastructure across Europe. Since then, the Commission and relevant stakeholders have sought to lay the foundations of a strong, centralised data-sharing legislative framework ahead of 2025, when the regulation is set to become operational.
2023 will be a key year in the development of the EHDS. A critical aspect of the task of policymakers and healthcare professionals will be to gain the buy-in of patients to build a better culture around data-sharing. This will require strategic efforts to illustrate the life-changing benefits of secondary data and dispel underlying concerns and distrust around the security and necessity of data-sharing.
EIT Health is proud to convene and connect best-in-class innovators, academics, entrepreneurs, and scientists, empowering them with the resources to deliver novel solutions that will change the way we deliver and experience healthcare across Europe in 2023 and beyond.
With the new year ahead of us, we pledge our renewed commitment to creating an environment conducive to healthcare innovation so that we are best placed to accelerate these positive transformations and forge ahead with the EIT Health mission to facilitate longer, healthier lives and more sustainable healthcare systems.
