The need to place the patient at the centre of the model of care is widely accepted and is thus reflected in the Health Plan. Meeting this need is a substantial improvement in services and involves changes in the way these services are provided and that is precisely what innovation is all about.
What is needed, therefore, is to ask ourselves what instruments we have to incorporate innovation in public services and facilitate this change of model.
The RITMOCORE project, coordinated by the AQuAS, is in fact a public procurement of innovation initiative which aims to incorporate innovation in the provision of services to patients which carry or need a pacemaker. The end aim is to achieve care of higher quality, more personalised and ultimately, of more value for those patients who have been fitted with a pacemaker.
Public procurement has revealed itself to be a lever for change regarding the model of provision and organisation of health services and of the relationship with providers. This is why the AQuAS has driven several initiatives at a Catalan and European level in this area, such as numerous European projects or the recent call by CatSalut for PPI projects.
Catalan hospitals (Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge, Mútua Terrassa and the Hospital Sant Pau) and English hospitals (Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital and Countess of Chester Hospital) have undertaken a joint bid under the clinical and administrative leadership of Hospital Sant Pau, and coordinated by AQuAS which will be published at the end of 2018. This bid will make it possible to contract a service that will make the tracking of all patients with pacemakers effective and stimulate their activation, and it will enable the selection of the most appropriate devices for each patient, promote the coordination between levels of healthcare and permit the management of change of the ICTs that are needed: an integral service in line with what the health plan requires.
This inspiring project provides a practical approach to everything regarding the key issues in re-orienting the model of care. It forces us to deal with the constraints of the regulatory framework of public procurement and make continual assessments of risk, but above all, RITMOCORE forces us to manage the complexity of multidisciplinary environments (medicine, nursing, contracting, finances, etc…) that provide a very enriching opportunity and a challenge at the same time.
Complexity is inevitably a source of innovation. Providing ourselves with the instruments to exploit all the potential in favour of the care of people is our responsibility. Society, the healthcare environment and collaboration with the private sector are highly complex realities which offer the opportunity to generate, adopt and spread innovation.
Post written by Marcel Olivé Elias.