HI-NL receives EUR 1.5M grant to expand its innovation services

The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport has recognized the important societal role HI-NL plays in medical technology innovation by awarding it a EUR 1.5 million grant to expand its innovation services. Following complimentary remarks and recommendations made in a recent letter to parliament ‘Status of medical technology policy in healthcare', the grant decision letter stated:

“The activities carried out by HI-NL, partly set up with a previous grant, are in line with the vision of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport on medical technology. […] The HI-NL round table expert sessions promote early dialogue between, among others, patients, innovators and healthcare providers. This promotes a better connection between innovations and societal and medical needs. […] Expansion of the HI-NL service by offering generic evaluation frameworks contributes to strengthening the Dutch innovation climate.”

The financial support provided by the ministry will allow HI-NL to further accelerate the innovation process for valuable new innovations, contributing to a health(care) ecosystem with safer and more cost-effective, affordable and sustainable innovations that benefit society as a whole. More specifically, HI-NL will further standardize and professionalize its existing activities. This will include building a learning organization, and sharing its knowledge and experience through the development and dissemination of evaluation ‘frameworks’ tailored to different types of medtech innovations, including diagnostics and artificial intelligence.

Since its foundation in 2020, HI-NL’s main activities have focused on providing guidance to innovators through its Round Table service. This service delivers tailor-made multi-stakeholder advice as early as possible in the innovation process, followed by hands-on guidance in all the subsequent steps needed to bring a medtech innovation to patients. By standardizing and further professionalizing its activities, HI-NL will be able to increase the impact and scope of its Round Table service and its services in general.

HI-NL’s extensive partner network and comprehensive infrastructure provide it with important insights into the challenges that stakeholders in the medtech domain experience. The constructive feedback, insights and suggestions that stakeholders in the HI-NL network provide are collated and used as valuable learnings that HI-NL shares with a broader audience to improve the Netherlands’ innovation ecosystem. It includes setting up evaluation frameworks to help guide next-step decisions at every stage in the innovation process. 

HI-NL’s vision is that working together and learning from each other are key to improving and accelerating MedTech innovation and implementation. It not only benefits innovators and stakeholders, it also benefits society as a whole. With the renewed grant from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, HI-NL will further address key bottlenecks in the medtech ecosystem and ‘bring Health Innovation to the next level’.