The Healthcare Innovation Cycle framework provides a roadmap to guide teams through the complex journey of innovating in healthcare while also profiling progress. It is based on the well-established Technology Readiness Level (TRL) methodology, modified to reflect the unique challenges in healthcare innovation. It has 10 maturity levels between the steps from defining an unmet medical need to becoming a standard of care. It is augmented to reflect a critical element of innovation in healthcare that the clinical, regulatory, and market/business domains must mature along with the technology. Even the best technology will not improve patient care if the other three domains are not adequately completed.
The Healthcare Innovation Cycle framework captures the experience of prior innovators by defining a core set of deliverables a team should complete at the intersection of each maturity level and domain. In simple terms, it is a checklist that tracks the maturity of an innovation in the ten maturity levels and four domains. It also provides next steps and critical milestones to plan work.
While the 10-maturity levels and 4 domains remain the same for all types of innovations, the core set of required deliverables will differ by solution type. To date, EIT Health and CIMIT have collaborated to build-out the following solution types:
