BMC: Exploit the potential of the innovation fund and pursue structural changes to standard care as a goal!
06.09.2022 11:42
After six years of the innovation fund, bold further development is warranted. Even with positive evaluation results, new care models have not yet succeeded in making the leap into standard care. This means that the fund has so far failed to achieve its goal of improving care structurally and across the board. The BMC therefore proposes fundamental changes in order to effectively use the diverse and strong innovative forces in the healthcare system for structural changes.
“Since its founding, the Innovation Fund has significantly improved the innovation climate in the health system, encouraged those involved to come up with innovative ideas and enabled a wide range of new collaborations. But it is still far from exploiting its potential,” summarizes BMC Chairman Prof. Dr. Lutz Hager summarizes the development of the past few years. In particular, despite numerous projects that have been assessed positively, no adjustments to standard care have yet been made. “Many innovation fund projects have impressively shown how we can provide better care. We now have to use their findings and dare to make structural changes to standard care,” Hager continued. This must be the guiding principle in the upcoming consolidation of the innovation fund, which is currently limited to 2024.
In addition, the coalition must boldly further develop the innovation fund in order to effectively use the innovative energy that lies in the healthcare system. Since 2017, the BMC has been promoting the exchange of experiences between project participants in the “Funded Innovation Fund Projects” working group. They have developed nine concrete and implementable suggestions for improving the procedures. “We need an innovation infrastructure that supports new care models from the idea through testing to implementation in standard care,” demands Hager. “I am convinced that the innovation fund will produce even better supply projects.” The BMC suggests, among other things:
- Innovations must transform structures of standard care. In order to implement findings from the innovation fund in standard care, the G-BA must bring together the requirements for the transfer in a specification and hand over the process to the BMG for tracking and coordination.
- Bundle individual projects into topic clusters and bring together findingsto generate synergies and learning curve effects. Project results can thus be implemented in a coordinated manner in standard care.
- Consistently design and evaluate new projects from the patient perspective. Adequate patient participation right from the start must be a prerequisite for a funding commitment.
- Reduce bureaucracy. Model contracts, uniform processes and retrospective accountability simplify procedures. For example, more actors from outpatient care can be won as partners for implementation.
All impulses from the BMC as well as further information can be found in the position paper “From project funding to innovation infrastructure”, which is available for download here: