Good practice:

Co-creation in a hospital Health Hub

To meet the continuous pressure and demand for new, better, and smarter healthcare solutions, The NDR engage in multiple research and innovation initiatives – one of them is the establishment of the hospital "Health Hub – Founded by Spar Nord Fonden".

The hospital Health Hub is an incubator and catalyst for clinical innovation for clinicians, students, entrepreneurs, researchers, companies, and patients. The Health Hub co-creates solutions addressing real clinical unmet needs to benefit patient treatment and clinical workflow. A prime focus of the Health Hub is to accelerate clinical innovation projects through collaboration across disciplines, sectors, and industries by providing access to specialist competences, network, close-to-clinic-facilities, proof-of-concept micro funding, and funding to free clinicians.

The Health Hub collaborate with the knowledge institutions and engage innovative students to work on innovation projects closely linked to clinical unmet needs and thereby stimulate the development of young talents and entrepreneurs in the NDR.
Another dimension of Health Hub is the public-private collaboration and that the life science industry (both pharma and medtech) is invited to engage in Health Hub activities. The ambition is that Hub activities will foster synergy in co-creation with clinicians, knowledge institutions and the industry.

Health Hub is funded by a private foundation (The Spar Nord Foundation) and the North Denmark Region. App. 827.000 EUR over a 5 year period. This includes a full time project manager, project funding, and specialist competences from the regions Health Innovation Unit to support enrolled projects.

Health Hub is currently engaged in 13 partnerships with companies and start-up institutions.
Proof-of-concept projects supported by the hospital Health Hub: 5 completed, 4 on-going, 6 in pipeline

The Health Hub in the North Denmark Region advance health innovation by addressing real clinical needs. Thus, a key success factor for transfer will be for the other regions to establish strong internal networks of clinicians to identify unmet needs for health innovation in the both primary and secondary sector.

Another focal point of the Health Hub is to accelerate the health innovation process by facilitating co-creation, as well as, providing access to specialist competencies (project management, commercialisation, legal, regulatory), micro funding, and incubator facilities in close proximity to the hospital. This, to create grounds for additional external funding and thus drive health innovation solutions forward so that they can mature and be exploited commercially to benefit of the patients.

Due to Covid19 the potential of the hospital Health Hub has not been fully explored.