Feeling the pain: Disruptive innovation in healthcare markets

Abstract

Healthcare is a growing market for products and services, costs are rising especially in the developed world. Disruptive innovations enable transition; less-skilled people do more sophisticated things in lower cost settings. In healthcare they promise to allow non-consumers new treatments reducing healthcare inequalities and ultimately to reduce the cost of individual treatments. A UK study shows adoption of such innovations is difficult because of the complexity of actors within the healthcare innovation network including clinical professionals, the supply chain, re-imbursement and regulatory agencies and healthcare service providers. Understanding cost containment in the overall system is key as is understanding the mechanisms and adoption conditions required to incentivise necessarily conservative service providers and clinical professionals with a busy, care driven agenda. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.