Innovations in healthcare transform the way healthcare gets delivered and the lives of people. Healthcare is getting person-centred and people are getting proactive. Do you recognize a pattern here?
I’m talking about P-value: person-centered and proactive. But how does this translate into the evaluation of healthcare innovations and the assessment of their value? Probably most of us relate P-value to the quantification of the statistical significance of observed results. I leave the discussion about the use or misuse of the statistical p-value to others.
When I talk about P-value, I am referring to a movement within research to fill the knowledge gaps of innovators, the end-users of innovations and other stakeholders. P-value in research should transform re-search into pro-search. Let me outline this movement in some more detail. The P-value in research of healthcare innovation includes:
- to involve the end-users of healthcare innovations from start to finish to get the study objectives and methods right;
- to consider the diversity of stakeholders involved and the knowledge gaps identified (eg. implementation fidelity, impact, cost-effectiveness) by applying multi- and/or transdisciplinary research strategies
- to liaise with Research & Development departments. The latter is also subject to change and is about to become Experimenting & Scaling. This expresses the need for innovations to be used by people to help them live better lives;
- to emphasize formative evaluations and to recognize the importance of mixed methods research to execute such evaluations;
- to speed up the pace of knowledge dissemination and to translate the results and findings to a broad audience in an understandable manner.
For the above reasons, I invite you to work with me to:
- raise awareness that pro-search is urgently needed to support users, innovators and others to learn and speed up healthcare innovation;
- train our future generation of pro-searchers and help them to make real impact (I am not referring to the scientific impact factor here);
- develop, fund and apply new strategies, methods and platforms for pro-search.
Let’s join forces and improve the value of healthcare innovations by expanding research towards pro-search by taking up our responsibility to society and making a difference: #p_value
Bert Vrijhoef, Chief Innovation Officer