Innovation

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Innovation

Seeking New Ways to Accelerate Access to Healthcare

About

The leading edges of biological sciences, digital technologies, and geopolitical policies are converging to amplify our ability to prevent, diagnose, manage, treat, and monitor health conditions in ways that are timelier and more effective than ever before. Nonetheless, access to novel and established innovations remains profoundly inequitable across the globe, limiting care in countries and communities where they may have most impact.

Lead: Dr Jonas Karlström

Associate Professor, Duke-NUS Medical School

The reality is that useful health innovations and technologies are often unavailable to the people in greatest need of them.

The SDGHI Innovation Core aims to address that by collaborating with partners to find innovative ways to seed, create, support, adapt, adopt and scale up advancements to accelerate access to healthcare in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia and beyond. We are also deeply engaged in creating new capacity building programmes for innovation in Global Health in Asia.

Innovation in Action

Building Capacity in Innovation Science

We are currently creating a new series of course modules in the field of Global Health Innovation. The courses will cover core components that each practitioner of Global Health Innovation needs to understand and master. We are leveraging existing expertise in the domains of innovation cycles, national health and regulatory systems, and will be focussing on burden-of-disease based priorities to build innovation capacity in the region.

These modules, developed with the support of innovation teams in Singapore, have been tailored to meet the diverse learning objectives of a diverse set of transdisciplinary practitioners, health professionals and innovators from across Asia-Pacific. We’re looking forward to offering the first Duke-NUS courses in Global Health Innovation to students and professionals in 2024.

Design-based Innovation

SDGHI and its partners from the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre are collaborating with national expert institutions and regional counterparts to adapt innovations developed in Singapore to the needs and requirements of low and middle-income countries.

SDGHI incentivises health innovations to urgent health challenges, evaluates product/service landscapes and deployment opportunities in resource-constrained settings, and assesses the feasibility, acceptability, and cost-effectiveness of global health innovations and technology in diverse contexts.

Needs-based Innovation

SDGHI is working in collaboration with institutional partners, NGOs, funders, academic medical centres and private sector partners in Asia on the co-creation of de novo innovations based on identified Global Health priorities. These efforts will respond to high-impact burden-of-disease conditions across the region, while being mindful of the unique capacities and capabilities of low and middle-income countries. We are devoting special attention to the power of frugal innovation solutions to tackle barriers of access to essential care in the region.

Read more about how we're partnering to progress access to affordable trauma care in the region.