Seminar: ‘Frugal and Reverse Innovations in Healthcare’

Staff are invited to attend a special seminar given by Dr Matthew Harris from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. ‘Frugal and Reverse Innovations in Healthcare: how developing countries might save the NHS’ will take place on Tuesday 24th April in the Sarah Swift Building (SSB0103). A light lunch will be provided from 12.30pm and the seminar will begin at 1pm.

Frugal innovations are cheaper, often repurposed technologies, not quite meeting a community standard but are ‘good enough’, and therefore, traditionally, have been considered to be most suitable for resource-poor settings, such as developing country health systems. Often frugal innovations have been developed in these settings to overcome enduring resource constraints, and where more advanced or sophisticated technologies are not possible to obtain. However, in the context of worsening resource-constraints also in the NHS, the concept of frugal innovations is of increasing importance and increasingly, in the UK, there is an imperative to identify those innovations that may perform equally but at lower cost. Bringing these innovations from low-income countries into the NHS (Reverse Innovation) is an emerging field. In this session, Matthew Harris discusses how low-income country entrepreneurship and creativity could lead to significant cost savings in the NHS, exploring the many challenges and barriers to identifying, adapting and adopting the innovations, touching on a diversity of literatures including diffusion of innovation, cognitive psychology and post-colonialism.

Matthew is a Clinical Senior Lecturer in Public Health, jointly appointed between the Department of Primary Care and Public Health, and the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London. He has worked for several years as a Primary Care physician in Brazil, as a WHO Polio Consultant in Ethiopia, as an HIV Technical Consultant in Mozambique and as a Global Health Advisor to the UK Department of Health. In 2014 he was awarded a prestigious Harkness Fellowship from the US Commonwealth Fund where he was a Visiting Research Assistant Professor at New York University, exploring cognitive biases in evidence interpretation in the context of Reverse Innovation.

Please e-mail Sue Bowler sbowler@lincoln.ac.uk if you wish to attend.