COHES.io

The development and uptake of novel digital technologies in healthcare are associated with several barriers, such as expensive and risky development processes, quality and security requirements, and fragmentation in regulatory and reimbursement schemes. Open innovation is an approach designed to foster innovation processes, increase efficiency, and reduce costs by bringing together various stakeholders of the healthcare ecosystem to create a supportive environment for innovation that helps overcome existing barriers. COHES.io intends to create an interregional open innovation environment for digital health by interconnecting the regional ecosystems of Norte from Portugal, Malopolskie from Poland and Attica from Greece. We aim to increase the connectedness of these regions by introducing common tools for collaboration and networking; to improve the efficiency of healthcare innovation by identifying possibilities for joint interventions (e.g. the creation of an interregional virtual living lab), and to support the transfer of best practice innovation support schemes. Via a bottom-up co-creation process involving a diverse mix of innovation stakeholders joint actions will be identified, and their implementation will be secured by the engagement of public authorities (COHES.io’s associated partners), being responsible for relevant innovation strategies and funding programmes. TU Delft, a central actor of a leading and well-interconnected innovation hub, will facilitate the mapping of common challenges, identifying synergies and complementarities in regional capacities and designing joint interventions with a methodology emerging from the EIT Health DRIVE ecosystem development program. Being one of the regional nodes of EIT Health, InnoStars provides the framework for cooperation and ensure the European-level dissemination and exploitation of COHES.io results’ and the extension of the applied methodology to further European ecosystems.