Panel Looks At Public Hospitals And Innovation

Public institutions often appear as lagging behind the private sector in innovation, especially in medical and healthcare science. But for the past decade, numerous international projects in public hospitals have included innovation as a driving force in their overall strategy development, according to speakers on a recent panel.

The session “Public Hospitals Can Innovate Too” presented experiences on how innovation can be built in at all levels of a public institution such as a hospital. The panel took place on the first day of the Geneva Health Forum held from 15-17 April.  

The panel was moderated by Prof. Louis Loutan, former head of the Division of International and Humanitarian Medicine at the Geneva University Hospitals, and Prof. Didier Pittet, head of the Infection Control Unit and president of the Commission on Innovation at the Geneva University Hospitals.

One of these initiatives is the first World Innovation Day, Innovation for Health (WID-I4H) Competition, launched in 2012 by Pittet and Dr. François Gilardoni, special advisor at Fongit Seed Invest (a Swiss seed money fund). World Innovation Day has already met success in various countries, notably Hong Kong, South Africa and Canada. The aim is to promote a global culture of innovation in medical and healthcare science at large.

Under this project, participating university hospitals organise an annual competition at a local level, in which hospital staffs can exhibit their innovations before an international and multi-disciplinary jury of experts. Prizes are awarded on the basis on the quality and the capacity of the invention to be made universal for healthcare, especially, in the field of patient safety. Afterwards, the first winner of each local competition competes for the ultimate global Innovation Award of Excellence at the WID-I4H.

The first WID-I4H will be held in Geneva on 28-29 August 2014. Further information will be available on their website which will go online from 1 May.

“The first WID-I4H is at vanguard of the healthcare and medical science,” Gilardoni said during the panel. “It recognises that hospital staff, at any level, who live at the front lines of patient care, are in a unique position to identify and pioneer improvements in the system.”

The WID-I4H not only provides a global platform for medical personnel to share and showcase their disruptive inventions, explained Gilardoni, but also brings investors from industry “who find in these ideas a way to make some money.”

The local competitions already took place, and many winning projects have already been developed into commercial products and could eventually be implemented in healthcare settings. For instance, an electronic hand bracelet, which improves patient safety by monitoring hand hygiene in real time and a new technique designed to ease and speed up the disinfection of equipment with which patients are routinely scanned.

Through the competition, participants are educated and advised about intellectual property rights issues. One of the underlying reasons is that a robust patent portfolio or a key patent application is generally perceived as having the potential to attract more investors.

Gilardoni told Intellectual Property Watch that “it is paramount for all our teams to understand the different types of patent strategies, such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, contract and labor law) and how they fit into their business, especially for those willing to commercialize their technology or product,” however, he added, “our competitors sometimes choose not to protect or retain IP, such as open source or philanthropy projects, and we must respect their decision.”

In the long run, the goal of the WID-I4H is to ensure that hospitals continue to work together to build what the co-founders call a World Innovation Academy, described as a global collaborative development network, which is a new concept, according to Gilardoni.

“The idea,” he said, “is to exchange and access know-how around the world and make sure that we can disseminate all this knowledge and find all these ideas that have a strong impact on patient.”

Joséphine De Ruyck is an intern at Intellectual Property Watch. She is currently finishing an LLM degree in intellectual property rights and ICT law at University of Leuven in Belgium. She holds a Master’s Degree in Law with honours from University of Louvain and an LLM degree from Queen Mary University of London. She has a strong interest in several intellectual property issues, especially access to health, climate change and new challenges facing copyright law.