What place does open innovation have in the healthcare industry? Here are two examples of how innovators are working to transform the industry on a global scale.
Drug Development
A couple of doctors recently posted a thought-provoking article suggesting that drug development companies could benefit from innovation initiatives such as done by Procter & Gamble’s “Connect and Develop’’ open initiative. “A thoughtfully constructed open innovation platform built around existing medications could offer enormous value in the development of new therapeutics,” they said. Such efforts are blocked by regulators, not entirely to our detriment, according to one commentator, who predicts that “a lot of nonsense would emerge in such online communities, and some of it would actually cause harm.”
However, the Indian government has had some success with an Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project launched more than two years ago. Similar to what these doctors envision, the initiative has engaged a global, on-line community of 3,000 people from 74 countries working to end the TB epidemic in India. Early success of the program has generated plans to extend research to other diseases such as malaria.
Information Access
The Economist is sponsoring a challenge seeking new and exciting ideas for business models that would support or enable a global healthcare information economy. The ultimate goal is a future healthcare information economy in which private health data could benefit healthcare research, lower costs and ultimately improve patient care.
Solvers are asked to submit a plan that would utilize modern data collection tools and diagnostic technologies developed over the last several decades to develop a new model of innovation in healthcare. It must be viable, with potentially hundreds of millions of customers, and scalable, based on the predicted future of healthcare.
One organization that has already begun this process is Open Health Tools. This nonprofit describes itself as an open source community with a vision of enabling a ubiquitous ecosystem where members of the Health and IT professions can collaborate to build interoperable systems that enable patients and their care providers to have access to vital and reliable medical information at the time and place it is needed.