About focus area Health Innovation
The grand challenge of the Swedish healthcare system is to maintain and increase quality of care while meeting increasing demands on healthcare delivery. To resolve this, availability and efficiency has to increase to control costs and to deploy more personalized, precise and proactive ways of working with health. This requires innovative solutions that focus on early preventive measures, the utilization of opportunities created through digitization, and increased collaboration across organisational boundaries.
To succeed, solutions need to be based on collaboration between the different parts of the healthcare system and the civil society and adopt a holistic perspective on health. This means:
- combining medical, promotive and preventive perspectives,
- seeing healthcare as a continuum spanning professional care delivery, self-care and health promotion and prevention, and
- facilitating co-production and participation between the various organizational actors and affected individuals.
The focus area’s two directions
Personalized Proactive Care
Healthcare is facing extensive challenges – an aging population, chronical diseases and pandemics, changes in patients’ expectations on healthcare quality, delivery and co-production and limitations in resources. The technical development around collecting, storing and processing data makes it possible to develop solutions to these challenges supported by data-driven methods, so-called information-driven care.
Information-driven care has the potential to streamline, individualize, secure, and evidence-based healthcare but also to accomplish transformation to more proactive approaches to health and healthcare based on co-production with actors outside the healthcare organization and more preventive and promotive approaches care.
Movement for Health and Performance
The direction Movement for Health and Performance performs research, education and collaboration on sustainable physical activity, exercise-based rehabilitation and health-promoting lifestyles and sports. The University is as a long-term partner for the development of treatment and rehabilitation in physical and mental illness, health-promoting educational environments in schools and sports, as well as interventions and models for motivation and promotion of healthy lifestyles. The activities in this direction increase specialization and impact in the scientific work, improve research funding, strengthen recruitment and training of staff, and establish and consolidate national and international networks as well as long-term partnerships with external partners.
