A quick guide to health care innovation and the NHS

Disruptive Women UK will be launching Tuesday, September 30th in the House of Commons. This post is a part of a series running up to the launch welcoming Disruptive Women UK. So you’re officially a health innovator. You have a product that works, so now you just need some people to use it. Broadly, you have two options at this point – to get users to pay for it themselves, or to sell it to a healthcare provider to use with their patients. Selling direct to the public is great if you have the right sort of product, but it might be trickier in the UK than in the USA or in some parts of Europe because there isn’t much of a tradition here of self-payment for healthcare. It might be possible to sell to private health companies or clinics in some form, but this isn’t likely to be an option for most innovators. This means that most UK health innovators are going to need to try to supply the NHS. Old hands tend to offer doom-laden prophecies at this point, saying that selling to the NHS is absurdly difficult and – more trenchantly – that the NHS is responsible for the failure of many viable, sensible innovations. Is this fair? Three interlinked factors immediately come into play: regulation and approval, the structure of the NHS market, and the way that services are procured. These are some of the most boring words in the world, but for many entrepreneurs they can mean the difference between glowing success and another job in a cafe. Regulation and approval are broadly sp...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: DW UK Mental Health Technology Source Type: blogs