A series of international online workshops on innovation in healthcare delivery is featuring presentations from Guy Boersma, Managing Director of Kent Surrey Sussex AHSN, and Gary Ford, CEO of Oxford AHSN.

The workshops bring together organisations from four countries – Germany, France, the USA and the UK – who are involved with promoting innovation in health systems across Europe and the United States. Organised by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies together with the French national health insurance fund (CNAM), the workshops are taking place over three days in January 2021.

Opportunity

They are an opportunity to share the AHSN model and the approach to national innovation initiatives internationally. Guy Boersma’s presentation during day one of the workshops covered innovation in the NHS, including the AHSN role, the Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC), and initiatives such as Rapid Uptake Products (RUP) and Information Technology Payment (ITP).

Guy Boersma, Managing Director, Kent Surrey Sussex AHSN, said:
“This international workshop series provides a valuable opportunity to share learning and best practice from France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom.

“On day one, discussion focused on the challenge of supporting the progress of both ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ innovation, with delegates reflecting on the crucial role played by human factors and the culture within organisations and systems.

“The UK’s approach to supporting the scaling up of innovation, as evidenced in AHSN Network impact reporting, really resonated with the three other countries as they look to accelerate innovation within their own systems.”

International dissemination

The European Observatory is a knowledge-brokering partnership hosted by the World Health Organization, which the UK is a member of through the Department of Health and Social Care.

The Observatory intends to build on these workshops to produce a Europe-wide policy brief on models for supporting innovation, which will also help to disseminate the work of the AHSNs internationally.

For more information

Contact Rick Fell