Publications

With all the old and new challenges facing our health systems today, innovation seems the only way to address health needs and strengthen the overall wellbeing of our societies. However, while innovations in medicine and health service delivery have revolutionized health care, they have also put increasing strain on our health budgets. What’s more, a number of new technologies that promised to improve health outcomes have proven to be harmful, or ineffective and wasteful. Often, the focus of incentives provided by health systems seems to be on certain types of innovation only, such as the development of new medicines or the possible uses of artificial intelligence (‎AI)‎, while the potential for new, patient-centred approaches in the way we provide services remains untapped. Therefore, it is crucial to consider what we mean when we talk about innovation in health, so we can focus our efforts in the areas that are bound to help us the most.

This book aims to provide a concise walkthrough on how innovation and its implementation can be understood, what we need to do to get the innovations necessary to address the needs of our populations, how we can make the best use of the innovations we have, and how we can transform our health systems to ensure we are equipped to keep learning from the ground up and innovating to meet new challenges. Given the vastness of these topics, the book is necessarily selective, and often reflects the amount of attention given to different types of innovation. In that sense, it hopes to spur discussions about what we need to work on in future and hopes to inform the work of the Observatory for years to come.