Overview

Different health systems have different strategies in relation to funding innovation in health. Finding new care and payment methods that improve patient care and contribute to health care sustainability is a perpetual quest in health systems to sustain high-quality and affordable health care to the public. One way to foster this type of innovation is through dedicated funding programmes. The aim of this workshop series was to share experiences and to explore possible lessons from four participating countries (France, Germany, United Kingdom, United States), specifically on the development and implementation of new care and payment methods. In three virtual workshops the following questions were discussed:

• ‘What are the priorities and how do we engage stakeholders?’
• ‘What does it take to make the fund work?’
• ‘How do we know it works?’

Each of the funding programmes in this workshop series was set up differently, each within a different healthcare system, either by their approach to collecting innovative ideas, their selection criteria for accepting projects, the amount of support they provided, their access to IT systems, etc. Yet, it appears from the discussions that the challenges of developing, testing, and implementing organisational innovations such as new care and payment methods are similar across systems. For instance, finding the right balance between what is feasible through evaluation versus designing a project with minimal bias, or the determining the right confidence level for measuring results. Also important is the ability for projects to adapt to the local context and for funding programmes to consider aspects of equity (e.g. socioeconomically disadvantaged areas and population groups). This shows the value of cross-country evaluation and learning of these funding programmes and of organisational innovation overall.