EIT Health and the Biomedical Alliance in Europe (BioMed Alliance) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to enable closer collaboration between the healthcare innovation sector and leading medical societies across Europe.
You might also like: HealthManagement.org talked to Dr Kurt Höller, Director of Business Creation at EIT Health, about a new partnership between EIC and EIT and the opportunities it opens for health innovation companies in Europe. Learn more
The MoU facilitates collaboration between academia, industry, startups and other stakeholders represented by EIT Health, and over 400,000 researchers and healthcare professionals within 35 European medical societies that form BioMed Alliance.
For the next two years, the new partnership will be focusing on the fields of education, innovation and entrepreneurship. The main goal is twofold. On the one hand, it is to ensure that the expertise of the clinical community is involved at all stages of health innovation, from development and testing to adoption and post-market evaluation of products and services. Clinicians, and their patients, have a huge role to play in shaping current and future focus of healthcare innovation, as solutions are much more powerful when they have been built to directly meet the needs of those using them, stressed EIT Health.
At the same time, innovation, and particularly the rise in digital solutions within healthcare settings, implies the need for continuous upskilling for healthcare workforces. Therefore, the partnership also aims to facilitate continuing education for clinicians to support them in using innovative solutions (i.e digital and data literacy).
According to Jan-Philipp Beck, EIT Health CEO, innovation in healthcare can only have true impact if created in collaboration with healthcare professionals and patients. Likewise, the broad adoption of innovative solutions“can only be achieved when people are ready and willing to use them”, so there should be an environment for healthcare professionals to continue learning.
In turn, Prof Wilfried Ellmeier, BioMed Alliance President, emphasised how the MoU would be instrumental in promoting Continuing Medical Education (CME) and help “have an even bigger impact on catalysing excellent health research and innovation in European healthcare”.
The MoU will be in place for a period of
two years and delivered as part of
each organisation’s existing activity, with a focus on identifying projects and
programmes that can become more interlinked with each other.
Source: EIT Health
