The healthcare industry is in the spotlight with technological advancements and breakthrough inventions in the field of medicine and healthcare services. But coming up with healthcare innovations is not always a piece of cake. Despite the enormous focus on healthcare innovations and the availability of a plethora of opportunities, many of these efforts fail miserably, resulting in huge losses for the investors.
What are the Forces Affecting Healthcare Innovations?
Various forces hinder healthcare innovation, let us take a look at how these factors affect the healthcare industry –
Healthcare Players
Various stakeholders in the healthcare industry have agendas that are different from one another. The competitive and contradicting interests of these parties may affect the successful implementation of healthcare innovations. For instance, doctors and medical specialists blame technology-driven product innovators for the high cost of healthcare systems. Such resistance from medical professionals makes it difficult to implement innovations in healthcare.
Funding for Innovations
There are typically two kinds of financial challenges that are prevalent in the healthcare industry: establishing a source to fund the development of healthcare innovations and the amount to be charged for products or services based on this innovation. Sourcing funds for healthcare innovations often become a very hard task for many innovators; thus, forcing them to drop the plans for implementing innovations.
Government Policy
Government regulations can either make or break innovations. Therefore, innovators must be well aware of the existing regulations in the healthcare industry that may directly or indirectly affect innovations. This would prevent them from falling into trouble with regulatory authorities in the future.
Technology
Investing in medical technology is a very crucial task. Innovators must have the answer to two questions related to adoption and change – ‘When’ and ‘How.’ Innovators must ensure that they do not suffer from a lack of infrastructure to support the innovation by moving too early or they do not wait too long and lose out on the competitive advantage of the innovation.
Customer Demands
Customers are constantly demanding solutions that are cost-effective and assure long-term safety. However, the development of many innovations will be costly, forcing the medical innovators to pass on the burden to the customers. This often causes resistance from patients to pay huge amounts of money and thereby discouraging players in the medical industry to limit innovations in patient treatment.
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