Kick-off Meeting in Thessaloniki, Greece!

Bridging Perspectives: The challenge of Transitional Care Innovation

Why is Transitional Care innovation so challenging?

Moving between healthcare settings, whether an elderly patient returning home after hospitalization or a young adult shifting from pediatric to adult care, can be overwhelming. While innovative solutions have the potential to make these transitions smoother and more efficient, real-world implementation is often hindered by regulatory, financial, and practical challenges.

Addressing these challenges requires a strategic approach to integrating innovative solutions into transitional care. The Evolve2Care Project is committed to this goal, leveraging collaboration and evidence-based strategies to drive meaningful change. Deliverable D1.1, “Roadmap on Navigating the Complexities of Enabling Innovative Technologies in Transitional Care,” provides a structured framework to support stakeholders—such as startups, researchers, investors, healthcare professionals, and policymakers—in overcoming barriers to HealthTech adoption.

Through literature review, surveys and stakeholder interviews conducted within the preparation of D1.1, the findings highlight key trends, stakeholder perspectives, and the crucial steps needed to drive effective innovation in transitional care.

What common patterns emerge in transitional care innovation?

Through research, surveys, and expert interviews, three major themes emerged as pivotal in shaping the future of transitional care:

● Regulatory Complexities: Navigating healthcare regulations is challenging due to inconsistencies across regions.
● User-Centered Design & Usability: Healthcare professionals and patients stress the importance of easy-to-use technologies. No matter how advanced a solution is, its success hinges on real-world usability and seamless integration into existing healthcare workflows.
● The Role of Funding as a Key Enabler: Funding is a major driver of transitional care innovation, helping ideas grow from prototypes to real-world impact. However, many innovators struggle with financial barriers, while policymakers stress the need for sustainable funding models. Public-private partnerships are emerging as a key solution, especially for high-risk healthcare technologies that need validation and testing.

Where do stakeholders see things differently?

Despite a shared goal of improving transitional care, different stakeholders often approach the problem from unique angles:

● Innovators vs. End-Users (Healthcare Providers and Patients): Innovators focus on technical challenges like interoperability and data security, while healthcare providers prioritize ease of integration and efficiency in daily practice. Patients, on the other hand, value user-friendly solutions that empower them in self-care.
● Innovators vs. Policymakers: While innovators push for faster regulatory approval pathways, policymakers emphasize regulatory rigor to ensure safety.
● Healthcare Providers vs. Patients: Healthcare providers are concerned with the adoption of new technologies within clinical workflows such as training requirements, costs, and system integration, while patients focus on ease of use and how well a technology fits into their daily lives.
● Living Labs vs. Innovators: Living labs focus on real-world testing and iteration of new healthcare technologies, while innovators prioritize technology development and market readiness, sometimes viewing feedback as an added complexity.

How can we align perspectives and drive change?

To turn challenges into opportunities, stakeholders must work together to ensure the effective advancement of transitional care innovations.
Key areas for alignment include:

● Collaboration between Innovators and End-Users: Engaging healthcare providers and patients early in the design process ensures solutions that are practical and easy to adopt.
● Balancing Flexibility and Regulation: Policymakers and innovators must work together to harmonize regulatory frameworks across countries, making pathways clearer while maintaining patient safety standards.
● Sustainable Funding Models: Policymakers and funding bodies must establish long-term, outcome-driven funding models to support the development and scaling of transitional care innovations.

What’s next for transition care innovation?

To truly transform transitional care, innovation must be practical, well-regulated, and financially sustainable. Here’s how we can make it happen:

● User-Centred, Interdisciplinary Approaches: By involving interdisciplinary teams in the development process, new solutions can be ensured to be clinically effective, user-friendly, and seamlessly integrated into care workflows.
● Clear and Flexible Regulatory Pathways: Streamlining approval processes while ensuring patient safety requires ongoing collaboration between innovators, regulators, and healthcare providers.
● Improved Funding Support: Policymakers must ensure long-term financial backing for impactful solutions. Sustainable funding structures are needed to support pilot projects, commercialization, and scaling of transitional care innovations.

The Evolve2Care Project continues to explore how we can bridge the gaps in transitional care, ensuring that innovation leads to real-world improvements for patients, providers, and the entire healthcare ecosystem.

Bridging the Gap in Transitional Care: Key Drivers, Barriers, and the Path Forward

Have you ever considered how easy—or challenging—it is to transition from one healthcare setting to another or back home?

For patients with chronic or acute illnesses, this process often involves specialized medical support. Older adults may require advanced care coordination, while young people need tailored support when transitioning from child to adult health services. This process, known as transitional care, relies on seamless coordination and continuity to ensure patients receive the right care at the right time.

Recognizing the importance of well-tempered transitions, the Evolve2Care Project is dedicated to transforming transitional care through innovation, collaboration, and evidence-based strategies. As part of this mission, Deliverable D1.1, titled “Roadmap on Navigating the Complexities of Enabling Innovative Technologies in Transitional Care,” provides a comprehensive framework to help stakeholders —including startups, SMEs corporates, researchers, investors, living labs, hospital administrators, clinicians, healthcare professionals, healthcare providers, policymakers, and tech innovators- address the challenges of integrating HealthTech solutions into transitional care settings. By analyzing literature, surveys, and stakeholder interviews, the general results highlight 3 key drivers, 3 barriers, 3 intersections of drivers and barriers and 3 opportunities that shape the future of transitional care innovation.

What’s driving change in transitional care?

Three major themes consistently emerge as driving forces behind innovation:

Regulatory Support & Flexibility: Clear policies and adaptable regulations help new technologies scale faster, particularly in areas like home care and AI-driven tools.
Technological Advancements: From AI to wearable health monitors, cutting-edge tech is making transitional care more efficient and accessible.
Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement: Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. Successful solutions often emerge from partnerships between healthcare providers, patients, researchers, and tech developers.

The Barriers: What’s limiting us?

Even though some challenges are universally acknowledged, different stakeholders perceive them in unique ways.

Here are the three biggest hurdles to slow down innovation:

Regulatory Challenges: Navigating healthcare regulations is no easy task. Literature reviews highlight the complexity and inconsistency of regulatory frameworks across different regions, making approval processes slow and cumbersome. However, innovators and policymakers face uncertainty, as national policies may not align with innovation.
Funding and Financial Constraints: Innovators struggle to secure investment and navigate reimbursement systems, while policymakers and accelerators emphasize the need for sustainable financing models and funding structures.
Technology Integration and Interoperability: New healthcare technologies often don’t “talk” to existing systems identified interoperability as a major challenge.

Where do drivers and barriers intersect?

Understanding how drivers and barriers interact is crucial for pushing innovation forward. Here are some key intersections:

Regulatory Flexibility vs. Safety Concerns: While flexible regulations foster innovation, they must also ensure safety, particularly for AI and medical devices.
Technological Advancements vs. Infrastructure Limitations: While digital health tools are evolving rapidly, healthcare infrastructure often lags behind. This is especially true in underserved areas, where limited access to digital infrastructure can slow the adoption of game-changing technologies.
Collaboration vs. Resistance to Change: While collaboration is essential, healthcare practitioners can be hesitant to adopt new tools due to the lack of training, trust, and perceived inefficiencies associated with new technologies.

So, how do stakeholders bridge these gaps and make transitional care innovation a reality?

Holistic Support Systems: Apart from including financial and regulatory backing, healthcare providers and patients need hands-on training and education to effectively use new technologies.
Tailored Solutions for Different Stakeholders: Developing targeted solutions that address each group’s concerns will help create a more integrated system.
Sustainability of Innovations: To ensure long-term success, funding strategies must prioritize sustainability. Demonstrating clear benefits in terms of patient outcomes and cost savings will encourage wider adoption and continued investment.

By understanding what’s driving innovation—and what’s holding it back— stakeholders can create a more connected, efficient, and patient-centered transitional care system. The future of healthcare innovation may afford turning challenges into opportunities if we seek for deeper collaborations and thus greater cross-fertilization.

barriers Blogs drivers survey

Project Coordinator at COHEHRE 2024 Conference

On Wednesday, 20 November, the EVOLVE2CARE coordinator, Dr Evdokimos Konstantinids, attendeed the COHEHRE 2024 Conference in Ghent, Belgium!

Hosted by the Odisee University of Applied Sciences and the Artevelde University of Applied Sciences, the event lasted three days (18-20 of November) and elaborated on the theme of Revolutionising Health Education: The impact of Innovative Practice with 4 sub-themes:

Simulation as a learning method
Living Labs
Integration of AI in teaching + assessment
Creating Blended Intensive Programmes (BIPs)

Dr Konstantinidis, represented AUTH and ENoLL partners during the third day’s parallel sessions to spread the word about the project’s recent kick-off and its open call for Living Labs and HealthTech innovators across different disciplines to collaborate and boost innovations for Transitional Care!

Belgium COHEHRE 2024 Conference news & events

Open Survey to examine drivers and barriers within the Transitional Care

Following our preparatory efforts during the first month, we are already looking to grasp the intricacies of innovation within the Transitional Care!

To this end, the entire consortium is working closely under Task 1.1 to conduct a comprehensive background research that is going to accumulate data through literature reviews, stakeholder interviews, and surveys in order to identify the key drivers and barriers that potentially influence the development of innovative technologies in Transitional Care sector.

Starting from the analysis of the indicated scientific work, the project team has already counted more than 70 drivers and barriers of specific categories, including legal; regulatory; fiscal; technical operational and other miscellaneous cases.

Based on the findings from combing the literature, the background research is now ready for the next step! To this end, EVOLVE2CARE is going to run an open survey to dive deeper into the matters of innovation in Transitional Care and solicit further insights regarding what drives innovation in the sector and what hinders it.

The survey will last for three weeks and seeks to understand how different stakeholders engaged with the transitional care, spanning from HealthTech innovators, Living Labs and decision makers all the way to healthcare recipients and their closed ones, experience the application and breakthroughs in the Transitional Care.

The survey’s input is going to prompt the EVOLVE2CARE campaign to bring together entrepreneurs and researchers with certified Health and Wellbeing Living Labs across Europe, with the end-goal to foster a new paradigm of collaboration and effective innovation to meet the actual needs of the Transitional Care sector!

barriers drivers Open Survey survey

Kick-off Meeting in Thessaloniki, Greece!

On October 30-31, 2024, the Evolve2Care project held its 2-day kick-off meeting at the Medical School of Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece!

Representatives from all five partners of the consortium, that is, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), European Network of Living Labs (Belgium), Anthology Ventures (Bulgaria), Sploro (Spain) and ViLabs (Cyprus) gathered to set the foundation for our initiative, which aims to create a people-centric experimentation ecosystem to support innovation in healthcare with a particular focus of the transitional care sector. The event was hosted by AUTH’s Lab of Medical Physics and Digital Innovation (iMedPhys Lab in short), whose team acts as our project coordinators. The agenda of the 2-days meeting featured in-depth discussions on project objectives, work packages, and coordination strategies.

Day 1 began with a general introduction to the project by AUTH. Professor Panagiotis Bamidis, head of the the iMedPhys Lab gave the welcoming speech followed by a brief round of partners’ introduction to break the ice and familiarise all the team members. Then, presentations were made by project coordinator, Associate Professor Evdokimos Konstantinidis and Despoina Petsani, who covered the project’s management framework, ethics requirements and financial control. Having addressed the modalities, we delved into the work packages on the experimentation spaces (WP1, WP2). AUTH and Sploro partners led the sessions to provide a comprehensive overview of the background review on the barriers and drivers of innovation in the healthcare sector that interests the project and to inform the team about the planned activities and responsibilities for the upcoming months. Our primary goal is to collectively understand the innovation capacity existing in the transitional care use cases that the project plans to implement. Such finding are going to feed into the actions envisioned within WP3 as this was presented by AV partners. The first day, concluded with the session of WP4. VIL led the Product Box exercise to have partners share ideas and synthesise together what shall be the basis of our outreach activities and materials.

After a vibrant social dinner hosted at the Thessaloniki’s Museum of Modern Art premises, partners met for Day 2 during which the discussions focused on validating the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the project’s roll-out, and on reviewing the defined use cases that will be essential part of the project’s open calls to match healthcare innovators with certified Living Labs. The plan for the open calls of the project seeks to to engage with innovators and researchers and leverage the AccelUp platform to liaise the engaged stakeholders with Living Labs across Europe that demonstrate a credible capacity to act as the testing environments for concepts and innovations that will advance the HealthTech in the transitional care.

With each partner bringing unique expertise, EVOLVE2CARE aims to foster a sustainable ecosystem that will drive healthcare advancements across Europe!

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