Governance Principle
Value-driven innovation
Value-driven innovation refers to aligning technology implementation with their intended societal benefit by adopting best practices that capture, incorporate, and promote societal needs and user values.
Why is it important?
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Aligns with societal values: Aligns innovation with societal values and expectations, ensuring they are ethical and governed.
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Promotes societal wellbeing: It benefits society as a whole by helping to improve the quality of healthcare and tackle challenges like rising healthcare costs and workforce shortages.
How do we make it happen?
For Switzerland to promote a value-driven approach to digital health implementation, decision-makers across the innovation ecosystem should:
Consider a blood pressure monitoring app.
Value-driven innovation would help ensure this app is usable and affordable for everyone.
Action 5
Monitor clinical use
Why monitor digital health innovations?
Digital technologies in healthcare offer opportunities but also pose risks such as privacy breaches, bias and opaque algorithms.
Monitoring the impacts of technologies is needed to address the challenges brought about by digital health innovations and to ensure digital technologies benefit the Swiss public and healthcare system. This involves carefully evaluating how effective treatments are, ensuring that all patients can access the necessary healthcare services, and measuring the satisfaction levels of both patients and healthcare providers.
What needs to be done?
Actors across the healthcare ecosystem should take the following actions:
Ensure oversight
Large clinical centres (public and private) should appoint a Clinical AI Officer, with responsibilities for coordinating, assessing, and monitoring the use of clinical AI tools. Smaller centres and private practices can rely on a local AI Officer to fulfil the same functions.
Train staff
Clinical centres should train staff on digital health technologies to ensure effective, responsible use and minimise risks (Action 7). Training should be updated regularly to reflect technology changes.
Monitor use
Clinical centres should monitor digital health's impact across all specialities, from diagnosis to treatment, assessing both clinical outcomes and broader health system impact.
Collaborate
Clinical centres should work with developers to ensure documentation, system auditability, and customizability. Ethical considerations, especially involving AI, also require joint decisions with clinical ethics committees.
Setup safeguards
Clinical centres should employ state-of-the-art bias mitigation techniques and explainability methods for AI systems.
Share results
Clinical AI Officers should share monitoring results with stakeholders, including regulators, researchers, patients, and other providers, to identify trends, best practices, and areas for improvement in digital health.
By adopting these strategies, Switzerland can ensure that new digital health innovations enhance the quality of care and serve the needs of patients, providers, and society.
Action 6
Prioritise innovation with social impact
Why prioritise innovation with social impact?
One common belief is that technological innovations, despite their disruptive potential, will eventually lead to desirable societal outcomes. At the same time, there is the concern that harmful technologies emerge because policy cannot contain pressures of private companies, and market dynamics.
Policymakers should collaborate with stakeholders to establish shared goals and needs to ensure new technologies benefit society.
What needs to be done?
To promote innovation with social impact, the following actions are needed:
Prioritise impact
Policymakers should collaborate with stakeholders to identify and prioritise areas where digital health can significantly improve society, focusing on factors like safety, equity, and cost reduction. Regulatory experimentation and priority review can help achieve social impact more quickly (Action 3).
Align the vision
Policymakers should support defining and promoting an aligned vision for digital health innovation. The DHCC (Action 1) can help by identifying high-impact societal needs communicated by diverse stakeholders.
Fund values
Policymakers should encourage funding agencies and investors to base decision-making on identified priorities and the aligned vision.