Open Innovation: Transforming Health Systems through Open and Evidence Based Health ICT Innovation

For many years the full potential of creating and leveraging integrated health ICT systems such as electronic health records to improve healthcare delivery, reducing its cost and promoting prevention has been elusive. Traditional health ICT business, innovation, development and adoption models have failed to address chronic road blocks to realizing its full potential and have led to many high profile failures. The chronic symptoms include persistent barriers to integration and interoperability, high cost, duplication of effort, and poor, to no support for collaborative, "evidence based" medicine. This paper provides a review of case studies and analysis on how open innovation, or open source processes, can break the grid lock and bring the fundamental paradigm shift needed to exploit the full potential of health ICTs. The paper will discuss how the open innovation model, as applied to health ICT, provides a framework for harnessing the naturally occurring "bottom up" forces and emergent behaviour found in complex adaptive systems such as healthcare. It does this by describing a model and context for collaborative, open, peer reviewed, evidence-based innovation and technology transfer processes. Evidence from case studies are presented on how open ICT innovation in healthcare provides essential feed backloops for supporting, researching, developing and disseminating while driving continuous quality improvement at a global scale.