Care in co-creation with patients will generate the hightest impact on innovating health care, says Janine Budding

Innovation has been around since the early days of civilization, even in healh care, innovation has a long history with Hippocrates, Galenus, Vesalius, Harvey, Laennec, Claude Bernard, Fleming & Marie Curie.

Innovation approaches have changed and taken on many different forms very rapidly over the past 150 years.

Nowadays we discuss concepts like patient centric-design and open innovation in the context of healthcare management. However I guess it makes perfectly sense to carry forward the experiences and findings to other fields of application like i.e. the field of health care in co-creation. Current developments within the health and care system (e.g. the evolvement of shared decision making, the increasing and desired autonomy of patients) display the changing role of patients from passive recipients of medical services to active partners and co-producers of their own health.

The latest approaches have evolved into what we call “innovation co-creation (ICC),” where all the relevant stakeholders are participating across the value chain.  And this approach is not just about a one-sided contribution model — as in “give me your ideas and then we will figure out what to do with them” — but a more collaborative engagement, with greater interaction and intensity of participation among creators, from generation, selection, incubation, and eventually, even to marketing the new product or service.

Hence the empowerment of patients can be seen as a quite familiar phenomenon to the empowerment of patients who are in the end also consumers of health services. The major challenge of consumer involvement into the disease management process is to utilize the knowledge and experience of patients in order to foster the prevention of diseases, the individual health status and the quality of life.