What makes a good Medical Innovation?

In his lecture, “what makes a good medical innovation?’ (28^th January 2008) Prof Lionel Tarassenko noted that several important ingredients are required.  The organization developing the new technology must remain nimble, and it must find the right partners in the early stages.  But also, drawing on fascinating examples of signal processing techniques applied to the continuous monitoring of the vital signs of patients in Intensive Care Units and in patients with long-term conditions, he illustrated that good ideas should come about through interdisciplinary collaboration between different areas of expertise.

In the cases that he used, the disciplines of medicine and electrical engineering were combined in perfect harmony.  Continuous monitoring allows for a greater predictive capacity in identifying those patients with imminent and worsening clinical conditions.  But also it overcomes the strangely adaptive behaviour of nursing staff to the many repeated false alarms that the existing monitoring devices were known for, namely to ignore them.

It seems that the future holds exciting innovations in many areas that combine medicine with other disciplines.  In the area of telemedicine, technologies such as teleSurgery can enable access to needed expertise in developed countries and help avoid a brain drain.  In the area of nanotechnology, new nanomedicines could completely displace certain classes of drugs and change the ways diseases like HIV, malaria and TB are treated.  In the area of eLearning technologies, capacity building and collaboration with international institutions can occur in real-time.  In the area of social networking, Web 2.0 and wiki will mean that health professionals and patients in developing countries can effectively network with each other and with the industrialized world, participating in knowledge development.  Finally, open access technologies are revolutionizing and democratizing medical publishing resulting in a paradigm shift in why and how we publish scientific research.

When researchers from different backgrounds talk to each other and cross-fertilize their work, creative and applied ideas emerge.  I wonder which will be the next inter-disciplinary collaboration to emerge as the front-runner in medicine.  Quantum physics?  Artificial intelligence?  Complex Adaptive systems?

It may or may not be apparent, but the Medical Innovation lecture series was devised to serve this function.  By bringing together students, researchers, academics, practitioners and managers to debate the cross-cutting issue of innovation, it is hoped that some cross-fertilization will emerge, and with that new ideas for future collaboration and indeed innovation.