Within health innovations, we distinguish between biomedical and technological innovation on the one hand and organizational innovation on the other 

Organizational innovation is focused on how organizations and systems work; its research is rooted in the social sciences and its results relate to different contexts of each health system and each organization within it. For example, how care is organized for a particular condition will depend on a number of factors. These include: 

These factors will be different for each organization and each health system. 

In practice, virtually all innovation in health and care is a combination of biomedical and technological innovation as well as organizational innovation.  So, the innovation challenges for medical innovation and for health systems are different. The central challenge for innovation in medicine is how to improve our ability to understand, diagnose and treat ill-health. While the central challenge for health systems is organizational innovation, and how to improve our ability to adapt our different organizations and health systems to realise the potential of a new biomedical or technological innovation throughout the system. 

While there is constant organizational innovation in health care, the context-specific character of this innovation means that learning from elsewhere is also dependent on understanding the origin of the innovation, as well as the destination.  One way in which the Observatory supports this process at European level is through providing detailed descriptions of the context that each health system provides through the HiT series. The Observatory is also contributing to better understanding these complex processes of learning between health systems, and how to bring about effective organizational change in practice. This is achieved through specific projects such as the TO-REACH project on Transfer of Organizational innovations for Resilient, Effective, equitable, Accessible, sustainable and Comprehensive Health Services and Systems, as well as through targeted knowledge brokering for specific innovations and policy briefs.