Global network of 'Living Labs': a novel healthcare innovation infrastructure for urban environments

Worldwide but especially in developing countries, rapid, unplanned and unsustainable patterns of urban development are making cities focal points for emerging health hazards. Traditional approaches to solving the challenge of... [ view full abstract ]

Worldwide but especially in developing countries, rapid, unplanned and unsustainable patterns of urban development are making cities focal points for emerging health hazards. Traditional approaches to solving the challenge of creating value in healthcare have often failed to achieve wide-scale, cost-effective, and impactful solutions. Novel, faster and iterative ‘trial and error’ methods are warranted to rapidly test healthcare innovations in real world environments. These evaluations need to be performed at appropriate scale and across different medical, cultural demographies that allow for reliable assessments of their effectiveness in everyday life. The Amsterdam Health & Technology Institute is a new, novel public-private partnership, which focuses on healthcare innovation in urban settings.

We will present our strategic and operational framework for a global network of ‘living labs’ in the Netherlands, China, US and Kenya. These labs provide real-time opportunities for rapid global testing and scaling of effective healthcare innovations in different urban health system contexts through Public-Private-Payer-People collaborations.

Examples of a ‘City Health Dashboard’ that combines, amongst others, health and socio-economic status using data visualizations will be presented. This dashboard allows care delivery professionals, health care payers, policymakers and researchers to understand the health status of urban populations, their demographics and their healthcare costs simultaneously. Subsequently, it enables the evaluation of the impact and effectiveness of healthcare interventions. Finally, we will present the design and methodology of a global, concurrently-run, cross-laboratory intervention study assessing the impact of home-based hypertension monitoring through the use of remote blood pressure monitoring devices. This study is a quintessential example how the novel methodology of living labs can accelerate innovation in urban health.