PontesNL

Thousands of health care professionals are working in health care institutions, fully dedicated to providing high quality health care. During their work, they regularly come up with ideas ‘for making health care better ’.

Innovative professionals who want to realize their ideas in their own hospital or beyond will experience that the innovation process in hospitals is full of pitfalls and traps. There are many stakeholders that need to be involved and persuaded to get their commitment for changing attitude and working methods. Implementation of innovations in hospitals is challenging and fails in many cases due to focus on the new (technical) product or treatment and a lack of attention for the professional environment in which the innovation has to be rolled out and implemented.

PontesNL is independent national program founded by Luuk Evers of Pontes Medical (formerly UMC Utrecht) and Joep Welschen of stichting MedtechPartners. Luuk developed with his team the Pontes method and was able during the past 18 years to get more than 12 successful innovative products to the market from scratch (starting from a researcher or care professional with a first idea). Within PontesNL the Pontes method is combined with the 18 years experience of stichting MedtechPartners to speed up the innovation process for Dutch medtech and digital health innovations. Pontes means ‘bridges’ and that’s what innovation needs: we bridge the gaps between stakeholders who need to be involved in order to develop and implement innovations successfully.

We see the following questions in hospitals:

• How do we implement the desired/required healthcare transition?
• How can we best innovate based on the clinical need?
• How can we improve the internal innovation infrastructure?
• What innovation do we bring in from outside?
• Which new innovations will we develop ourselves?
• Which good ideas are we going to link to initiatives elsewhere?
• How can we implement and roll out innovations faster?
• How can we collaborate with market parties? What can you offer each other and what can you ask of each other?

To enable innovation, hospitals should support the innovative professionals and scientists with an innovation infrastructure containing a method with clear project steps and easy access to all stakeholders that need to be involved.
Hospitals or care organizations are invited to become a member of PontesNL and as a ‘Pontes house’ start building the innovation infrastructure and learning the Pontes methodology by using our:

• 5 hours per month custom 1:1 support
• Access to our network, formats and tools 

Pontes support - additional capacity for innovation managers

We offer additional capacity for healthcare professionals or researchers with a good idea that is too early for the holding company and too early for the business community. And where the own innovation department sees the value of the project but does not have enough time (and experience) for the right guidance.

• We help these healthcare professionals or researchers with a good idea ​​how to collaborate with market parties using the Pontes method.
• Who do you need for further development, how will you collaborate, what do you agree about IP, about investing together, joint ownership and the distribution during out-licensing.
• First basic support block consists of 120 hours of customized support over a period of 12 months.

We see the following support questions from startups:

• Is my innovation idea feasible?
• How do you test the clinical need?
• Which stakeholders are involved and what is their importance and influence?
• How do you formulate the value proposition?
• How do you get stakeholders involved in your project?
• How do you work with a hospital as a startup?
• How do you set up a pilot in such a way that it is implemented immediately if it is successful?
• How do you scale up after the first successful implementation?

Our added value for startups:

• Thanks to our experience with the entire process and knowledge of the substantive innovation process (the Pontes method), we can support teams in smart prioritization. What do you need to do today to create value over the next 2 weeks?
• We know all the relevant programs, accelerators and incubators and, together with the teams, we can determine exactly what makes sense and when.
• We engage selected, qualified experts at the right time (we have a pool of qualified experts from all required disciplines).
• We have access to hospitals for pilots and usability studies.
• We understand the problems startups are facing.
• We focus on realizing the plans with a hands-on approach.

Our services for startups:

• Experienced sparring partner
• Challenging the idea, Stakeholder analysis and Implementation strategy
• Setting up and supervising pilots and scaling up
• Connecting with experts from our own qualified expert pool

Based on our experience in hospitals and startups we oversee the entire project as from first idea until implementation in hospitals. We know how to involve the right expertise at the right time and give access to our network. We strongly advise to integrate all actions that are key for success as from start. For example: start thinking about the requirements and needs of all stakeholders that can influence implementation in a very early stage.  

Spaarne Gasthuis

Mindy Asamoah

PontesNL has supported Spaarne Labs in the development of the internal innovation process. The result is a more effective workflow from idea to experiment. In 1:1 sessions it's great to have PontesNL as a sparring partner for all kind of innovation challenges. During the monthly innovation managers meeting it's fun and valuable to share experiences and knowledge with the innovation managers of the other Pontes houses.

Want to know more? Please contact:

Luuk Evers		Joep Welschen
[email protected] M +31 6 - 19 21 66 89		[email protected] M +31 6 - 21 53 37 93