What makes a startup innovation tick and stick in public healthcare?

There has been a number of healthtech initiatives in Singapore this year. What makes an initiative not only tick the boxes in terms of fulfilling a market need, but also stick when it comes to implementation in the user setting?

For Healthcare InnoMatch which is in its fourth year running, two success factors come into play when it comes to sustaining innovations in the public healthcare setting.

The first is multistakeholder commitment and the second is aligning innovations with national priorities, including ageing and population health, said both Centre for Healthcare Innovation (CHI)’s Associate Professor Wong Hon Tym, and Assistant Director, Tsai Pi Kuang, to GovInsider.

Prof Wong and Tsai are part of the team managing Healthcare InnoMatch, an initiative parked under the CHI Start-up Enterprise Link programme (CHISEL).

Presented by the Temasek Foundation and Ministry of Health (MOH), the Healthcare InnoMatch initiative focuses on bridging the gap between startup innovations and the public healthcare sector.

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Global startups for local public healthcare

The initiative targets global startup innovations, at the mature stage, for the Singapore public healthcare sector.

In this way, it differs from what agencies like A*STAR and SG Innovate do, as they target early-stage, emerging tech innovations.

Prof Wong shared that more mature startups are categorised as having a technology readiness level (TRL) of seven and above. “We are therefore aiming at ready-to-market solutions which are ready to deploy already,” he explained.

Although CHI is managed by the National Healthcare Group (NHG), the initiative has since seen a number of startup innovations scaled from test-bedding in one public healthcare institution or cluster, to adoption across all three clusters.

One of these success stories is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered arm rehabilitation robot that was first tested on both inpatients and outpatients with stroke at Tan Tock Seng Hospital for 15 months, before it was scaled to two other hospitals, Singapore General Hospital and National University Hospital.

Compared to in-person sessions in the hospital, outpatients with stroke were found to complete three times more exercises using H-MAN, the invention by local startup, Articares.

“I dare say that CHISEL is perhaps the strongest example of a tri-cluster collaboration that we are proud to be hosting and continuing to develop,” said Prof Wong.

To ensure consistency in assessing the value of innovations across the three different clusters, CHI developed a common evaluation framework, known as CHIEF, last year.

“With CHIEF, budding innovators will be equipped with the necessary guidance system from conceptualisation to adoption. Using the framework, they are able to benchmark their progress to specific milestones and checklists identified,” BioSpectrum Asia reported.

Its advisors are made up of clinicians, researchers and officers from local and international healthcare innovation organisations led by MOH.

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Marrying business strategy with public health contextual knowledge

A key value proposition provided by CHI is the help it provides startups in navigating the regulatory and procurement processes in the public healthcare space in Singapore.

Agency partners include national healthtech agency, Synapxe; supply chain agency for public healthcare, Alps Healthcare; as well as clinical innovations and enterprise agency, National Healthcare Innovation Centre (NHIC).

“The right players are onboard. We’ve got all three clusters for economies of scale. We’ve got Synapxe and Alps for the policy mechanics. We’ve got both Temasek and MOH for funding,” said Prof Wong.

Health Promotion Board (HPB) and the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) were also involved in the judging panels when the calls for innovations were centred around themes of population health, ageing and community care.

Although AIC is not directly involved in the initiative, CHISEL is currently discussing with them in terms of subsequent funding to sustain the implementation of the startup innovation in the community setting, added Tsai.

Beyond funding support, Temasek Foundation was also able to bring in “strong business sensibility to the evaluation [of innovations],” said Prof Wong.

“Public healthcare has always been a bit weak in this area, and therefore one of the challenges was getting up to speed with business models, business strategy and actually realising that that sometimes is the showstopper,” he explained.

The startups are also supported by the operational staff working in the hospital where the solutions are being test-bedded, Tsai shared, where they will be provided feedback to hone the solutions for the patient users’ needs.

Global partners and regional ambitions

Focusing on global startups has led to CHISEL partnering with global trade and innovation agencies to promote the initiative. These agencies include Enterprise Ireland, Innovation Norway, Japan External Trade Organisation (JETRO), Business Sweden and more.

Tsai shared that an Estonia’s healthtech agency representative was present at the finale event of this year’s InnoMatch, and said that they were keen to explore the possibility to bring onboard Estonian startups for next year’s event.

When a startup with an innovative idea goes through Singapore’s regulatory approval process, it eases its expansion into other markets, he explained.

CHISEL was also invited to international conferences organised by accelerator platforms in Spain (MedTech Actuator) and China (Xnode) targeting their respective MedTech startups, as well as the Hong Kong Health Authority for their clinicians – with the sharing centred around aligning innovation with national healthcare priorities.

Moving forward, the CHISEL team holds regional ambitions for the initiative.

Prof Wong shared that for a start, the initiative will explore involving healthcare institutions from the rest of Southeast Asia – either in the judging panel, or as testbed partners to implement the solutions.

Context relevance would be key, as InnoMatch may be tweaked to match the social, economic and cultural context of a particular country, he explained.