Toward Open Innovation and Data-Driven Health Policy Making

Addressing digital open innovation from the policy perspective, we explore how the healthcare policy makers, concerned with producing more effective and preventive policies, would benefit from more open processes of knowledge flows. What is the role of data in health policy making? What could be done to advance open innovation in the healthcare sector based on heterogeneous sources of data? Digital technologies have enabled new ways to generate, collect, analyze and share health-related data, which has greatly contributed to opening the healthcare sector. The underlying thinking is that more readily available information, together with policies aimed at prevention rather than treatment, could radically reduce the costs in healthcare, while simultaneously improving the quality of care. However, healthcare as an innovation system is very different from other sectors, setting specific challenges on knowledge sharing and processes. Based on empirically grounded research in Northern Finland with a focus on preventive data-driven healthcare, this chapter studies how healthcare policy making could utilize more distributed data, information and knowledge flows across organizational boundaries. The results of the study suggest that technological and analytical solutions brought by digital technologies have the ability to support faster and better use of data in decision-making, and speed up the distribution of knowledge flows across different public decision-making bodies, and break the silos in public policy making for producing better and more efficient health and well-being services for the citizens. However, the use of different data sources is effective in preventive healthcare only if knowledge is systematically integrated and carried across organizational boundaries. This highlights the central role of policy makers as the leaders in advancing open innovation in the public sector.