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The EIT Health Foundation has awarded the iRaise programme, organised by the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries de Catalunya (AquAS), with the Best Educational Project 2024 Award. The award was presented during the celebration of INNPULSO Salud, the main national event on innovation in the health sector.

iRaise is the first educational programme on innovation adoption and the only one taught in Spain included by the European Union in the report ‘Benchmarking of innovation procurement investments and policy frameworks across Europe’, which analyses and compares the innovation policies of different European countries. Nearly 200 professionals from different Spanish and European health systems have already taken part: primary care doctors, gynaecologists, nurses, IT technicians and hospital managers.

Transforming long waits in the ER into helpful time for a patient in pain to inform the medical team, make gynaecological care for women faster or assess how much a new medical device will help the patient. These are some of the projects that have been defined within the framework of the course and which have been integrated into Spanish hospitals or healthcare systems.

Ismael Said, an internist in the Galician Health System, explains that "the health system needs health professionals to have an innovation perspective because it helps to focus on needs and solutions. We are medical professionals, and we know where innovation is needed, but we need to learn to detect the barriers to implementing an innovation project and focus it in such a way that the whole team benefits, which is essential to take it forward so that it does not remain a micro-project and can actually be implemented," adds the expert.

Currently, according to the report 'The Strategic Use of Innovation Procurement in the Digital Economy' (PwC, 2020), less than 25% of R&D&I grants are commercialised, and less than half of public contracts fail to achieve their objectives. María Ángeles Celda, a nurse expert in pain at the Hospital General de València, says that 'it is very powerful to have multidisciplinary teams working on innovation projects because we are the ones who control and touch what happens every day in the ER; you see where you can make an improvement. The problem is that you don't know how to scale it up and how several hospitals can benefit from an innovation'. (...) 'For a healthcare professional, choosing a funding vehicle is very difficult when implementing an innovation project. We have no training in that. We need help to know where to invest, the opportunity cost of projects, and to think differently in order to integrate our knowledge of reality with how to adopt an innovation and not fail,' she adds.

Success stories: pain assessment app

At the Hospital General de València, 80% of patients in the ER were in pain. The medical team needed to develop a new strategy to speed up care and optimise treatment. 'We needed to assess it better and faster, but we were unsure how to approach it,' says María Ángeles Celda. This need and the 10 weeks of training with iRaise, as well as the collaboration of a team of professionals made up of nurses, IT specialists, pain experts, hospital ethics technicians and the technology provider, gave rise to the application that is now used by patients in the Emergency Department of the General Hospital to report pain and help speed up the triage process.

CARE4WOMEN

CARE4WOMEN is a transformative project to integrate all the sexual and reproductive health units of the public and subsidised system in Catalonia, from the sexual and reproductive health care units (ASSIR) of primary care centres to the obstetrics and gynaecology services of hospitals. The team of obstetrician-gynaecologists and midwives who manage CARE4WOMEN entered the iRaise programme with the project ready. Elena Carreras, Head of the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department at Vall d'Hebrón Hospital (Barcelona) says that 'iRaise helped us to turn the idea around and make it a long-term sustainable project so that when we finished it, CatSalut could integrate it and make it own in the long term, both from the point of view of IT and process integration between the ASSIRs and the hospitals and the point of view of training professionals'.

15 innovation projects and almost 60 million euros

In total, 15 Public Procurement of Innovation projects have already been completed through the iRaise programme, mobilising a total of 60 million euros. Some, such as the Real World Lab promoted by the IDIAP Jordi Gol, are moving forward with a view to be implemented in other national and even international health systems. 'The companies come, they explain what they need, and we provide them with the research equipment they require to develop their prototype, we organise focus groups, we tell them what characteristics their device must have to work, we carry out user experiences and other activities that will help the future adoption of their technology. At the IDIAP Jordi Gol, we had these teams at our disposal and an idea. Training helped us to shape all this and implement it in an economically and humanly effective way.

The next edition of the iRaise programme will take place in early October 2025. Rossana Alessandrello, the scientific director of the programme, says that the award received a few days ago from EIT Health 'is a recognition that reinforces the organisation's work and commitment to transforming the healthcare sector through innovation'.

Further info:https://www.iraise.eu