Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme: Positive decision on BFCC

BFCC aiming for Innovation within fracture management and a transnational fracture registry platform composed of 6 hospitals from Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden

In ageing societies, the need for innovative products and clinical procedures for fracture treatment is increasing due to more age-related fractures and comorbidities such as osteoporosis or post-surgery complications like infections. Innovations must reduce the total cost of care or clearly improve the quality of care at a justifiable cost and bring new solution to outstanding medical challenges.

The industrial sectors for innovation are broad covering implants, imaging, pharmaceuticals, wound care or single use surgery devices. These trends already led to a rising demand for innovation and investments e.g. by the European medical technology industry which increased their R&D spend 11% from 2012 to 2013.

At the same time, research and innovation within fracture management is facing various challenges in understanding clinical needs and effectiveness, reducing costs of innovation and time to market. Clinicians and companies often lack insight into the total costs of care, the effectiveness of treatment and the causes of adverse health outcome in hospitals. To overcome these challenges, clinical fracture registries can provide evidence in the clinical “real world” and reveal needs and potentials for innovation.

Further, clinicians and hospitals are important actors in the innovation process helping to identify needs and to ensure user oriented products. Around 50% of new products are initiated by clinicians. Accordingly, companies in the BSR need direct access to hospitals and clinicians for collaboration within needs assessment, preclinical research, product development, clinical trials, and post market follow up studies or health technology assessment. Moreover, an intensified collaboration between clinicians across hospitals and countries benefits the innovation of clinical procedures through the exchange of best practice, influenced by different national, organisational and regulatory conditions.

Finally, successful innovation is driven by fast market access across countries which can be facilitated by collaboration between clinicians and companies, which is especially relevant for start-ups and SMEs in the Baltic Sea Region.

“The Baltic Fracture Competence Centre BFCC will respond to these challenges by aiming at accelerated and effective transnational collaboration for innovation within fracture management in the Baltic Sea Region,” says Nils Reimers R&D manager at Stryker Trauma in Kiel (Germany), one of the BFCC partners.

Anders Jönsson, head of Orthopaedic Trauma at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden adds “The BFCC will develop and implement a transnational fracture registry platform of 6 hospitals from Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden, allowing a comparison of the process and outcome quality across institutions and countries.”

This transnational research and innovation infrastructure will foster the evidence based identification of clinical best practice and needs for innovation.

BFCC will establish a transnational collaboration platform between hospitals and industry, which will be tested in 3 transnational pilots, with 6 hospitals and 4 companies involved. With its lead partner Life Science Nord Management, its 14 further project partners and its 26 associated organisations the BFCC has an excellent basis to establish a Baltic Sea Region wide platform for future collaboration and thereby foster innovation within fracture management.

As part of the EUSBSR flagship project ScanBalt HealthRegion the project will open the research and innovation infrastructure and all identified innovation needs to all Baltic Sea Region companies.

For further information stay tuned on www.lifesciencenord.de

Learn more about the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programmewww.interreg-baltic.eu

Contact
Imke Schneemann
Life Science Nord Management

+49 431 9089 6858