Last May, H4 organized its first event with nearly 150 participants who came to meet and exchange around a common goal – to work together on the challenges facing the healthcare sector and to meet the expectations of innovators, caregivers, and care recipients.
In the morning, a plenary session was organized to hear from key partners in the Vaud ecosystem, to introduce H4, and to illustrate projects already underway.
In the afternoon, four participatory workshops were organized with the following goals:
– to contribute to the positive development of H4’s strategic direction;
– to fine-tune the evaluation criteria for projects submitted to the H4 platform, reflecting the interests and concerns of healthcare and innovation stakeholders.
We are pleased to share with you today the results of these thoughts and exchanges.
About sixty criteria for evaluating projects were proposed and discussed during these workshops. Subsequently, we worked on this list: deleting duplicates, gathering some criteria into one, and clarifying and reformulating them to obtain unity, while making sure to remain faithful to what had been discussed. You will find the 31 resulting criteria in the document that can be downloaded here.
These criteria could be classified into seven main themes:
- Accessibility
- Continuity
- Sustainability
- Participation
- Customization
- Prediction
- Prevention
These themes provide a synthetic view of the aspects that are currently important to the members of the H4 community and to healthcare in general. Interestingly, the 4Ps of predictive, personalized, preventive, and participatory medicine (a concept already well-known in the USA) are included in these categories and constitute an approach that truly reflects the spirit of healthcare providers and innovators. The 4Ps are now essential aspects to be taken into account at every level of the design and development of a project as well as in the final solution, product or service.
Furthermore, we find the themes dear to SILAB and more broadly to innovation in healthcare that have come out during the events, workshops, discussions, and projects we have supported in recent years: accessibility and continuity of care.
In this context, the concept of accessibility refers to access, in a timely manner, and in an appropriate location, to adequate healthcare of satisfactory quality at an affordable cost. It also refers to the integration of an ethical framework that respects cultural and social differences, as well as physical and mental disabilities.
The concept of continuity refers in a global way to all the services provided during a care pathway – inpatient or outpatient, from hospital to home, from one department to another, during an acute or chronic illness, in the succession of several illnesses – and requiring optimal coordination of all actors.
Sustainability of the entire healthcare system returns to the forefront.
It includes care and medicine in general and is clearly “ ”. Indeed, the concern for sustainability is by definition about the environment, from the packaging of medicines to the materials of care devices to the energy consumed by a hospital. It is also about the impact on society – an impact also addressed through the theme of accessibility. And finally, there are the economics and technical aspects, such as interoperability, because everyone knows that the system has to be made financially viable, because if a project is not, it will disappear and will have served no purpose. Of course, one can imagine favoring large integrative projects that put forward more global solutions so that their viability is more systemic instead of depending solely on an isolated effort.
Implementation of the above findings
In the short term, the project evaluation form used by the H4 Selection Committee will be revised with new questions that best incorporate these seven themes.
In the longer term, the project page on the H4 website will be expanded and it will be possible to rate projects based on the selected criteria that represent the true interests and concerns of our H4 community.
For further information or suggestions, please write to: contact@h4vd.ch
We warmly thank all the people who participated in the workshops and contributed to these valuable results.
H4 is being built thanks to you, with you, and for all of us!
