Healthcare Technology needs to be innovative

The most valuable healthcare innovations will come from ingenious solutions to high-end problems, and The Technology Partnership are leading the way.

By Douglas Bradshaw, medical practice head, The Technology Partnership12:41PM GMT 17 Dec 2015

Innovation for innovation’s sake rarely results in technology that becomes broadly adopted – this is especially true in the healthcare market.

By contrast, innovation that addresses a specific unmet need usually results in technology that enjoys rapid and widespread uptake.

Within healthcare, such uptake typically leads to improved patient outcomes, and can also lead to commercial success.

However, over the past 50 years healthcare spending has increased significantly as a percentage of GDP, and will continue to rise as the population ages. This has led to speculation that, despite the efforts of organizations such as NICE, the healthcare structure is already broken, and most stakeholders agree that it is important to find a way to reduce healthcare costs.

Technology companies such as The Technology Partnership (TTP) are developing simple, low-cost technologies that measure disease markers

So, as with other areas of healthcare, the main challenge for diagnostics innovation is addressing new needs with growing cost constraints. However, the flipside of challenge is opportunity – and this is the lifeblood of product and technology development companies.

There are many examples of opportunities within the diagnostics space – here are a couple. The first opportunity is related to financial processes within healthcare and, in essence, is the move from prescription-based reimbursement to an outcome-based reimbursement. For this to happen, the process requires devices that can measure or monitor the outcome (or result) of treatment. A positive outcome would then trigger reimbursement.

Technology and product development companies such as The Technology Partnership (TTP) are developing simple, low-cost technologies that measure these disease markers to confirm the presence or severity of diseases. This revolution in healthcare reimbursement should yield improved outcomes as well as reduced costs.

Antibodies take a long time to develop and are expensive, so healthcare providers are looking at cheaper, more efficient methods

The second example of diagnostic innovation is in the field of personalized medicine. This happens when a patient’s healthcare is customized to match their exact needs. An example is the selective use of certain treatments for HER2-positive breast cancer that are otherwise ineffective in the HER2 negative disease. Antibodies are used to detect the HER2 biomarkers to enable this selective use.

Antibodies are biological flags produced by the body in response to real or perceived foreign agents such as bacteria, and they can be manipulated to detect or even destroy cells such as cancer cells. But antibodies take a long time to develop and are expensive, so healthcare providers are looking at cheaper, more efficient methods. This has created the opportunity for companies such as TTP to develop biological compounds that act like antibodies but are based on protein alternatives.

For 2016 and beyond, there will certainly be huge challenges across the healthcare sector, which can only mean greater opportunities for product development companies to provide innovative solutions that help maintain a viable healthcare system. Within this context, the most valuable innovations will come from ingenious solutions to high-end problems.