Relieving Bottlenecks in Health Care Innovation

Relieving Bottlenecks in Health Care Innovation

Boru, A.

Smulders, F. (mentor)
Goossens, R. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Product Innovation Management

Master of Science Strategic Product Design

2012-06-29

Healthcare is a highly complex system which contains many stakeholders, such as patients, relatives, doctors, nurses, medical specialists, hospitals, health insurance providers, pharmaceutical companies, medical technology manufacturers, public health representatives and government. Although providing the optimal care to improve the health of patients is the common aim, each stakeholder has a different viewpoint on how to achieve that aim (Kanter, 2011). This incongruity in the system is one of the biggest barriers to innovate in healthcare area (Kanter, 2011). Any innovative effort initiated by a stakeholder is often prevented from materializing into an innovative result due to the complex entanglement of stakeholders within the different areas of healthcare structure. Thus, it is very difficult for innovation to be accepted and adapted by the entire healthcare system, resulting in particularly lengthy innovation process. Research Aim and Focus The main goal of this project is to provide a conceptual framework that supports and improves the current product/service innovation process in the health care area. The preceding research focuses on understanding the dynamics of health care innovation, to look into the bottlenecks in implementation of innovation to new products/ services (from perspective of the stakeholders) and the redesign of product/ service innovation on the conceptual level in accord with the health care system of the Netherlands (Europe). Structure of the Research and Report Outline As indicated, health care is a complex system with many stakeholders. Therefore, the first part of the research focuses on discovering all facets of the health care innovation system including its key stakeholders (Chapter 1) and identifying the barriers of health care innovation and current solutions based on literature review (Chapter2). The second part of the research (Chapters 3 and 4) presents the findings of the empirical investigation of bottlenecks of innovation in the Dutch Health Care System. The field research consists of unstructured and semi-structured interviews with 14 individuals as representative of different key stakeholders and 2 observational studies; one held in Erasmus Medical Center New building Office, Rotterdam, and the other one held in Young Entrepreneurs Society Building, Delft (YESDelft). The third part of the research focuses on analysis of the results. The primary results are explained in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4 explains and uses theoretical frameworks to analyze the findings and Chapter 4 are based on field research and analysis of the results.

health care innovation
Bottlenecks in health care innovation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:31c1f237-3bd4-423a-bd07-b73a5ccf92f1

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2012 Boru, A.