Health innovation does not scale through documents. It scales through people, trust and real environments.
For the first time, senior leaders from across the Health Service Executive, Hospitals, public agencies, industry, clinicians and academia came together on site to explore how innovation works in practice by visiting the Medtronic Customer Innovation Centre in Parkmore, Co Galway.
The leadership Innovation Field Trip was delivered as an objective of the National Health Collaboration Council (Health Service Executive and HealthTech Ireland) where the focus was practical and grounded in delivering the best in patient care. With the emergence of the HSE Innovation Framework in the coming months, attendees explored how innovation is governed, adopted and scaled safely in real healthcare environments, how to deliver innovation to users and what leadership looks like when systems are actively changing.
This engagement reflects years of relationship building across the health system and ongoing work with our members, to support national priorities, including Digital for Care, the AI agenda and broader innovation policy. It also mirrors the growing convergence between healthcare delivery, digital health, education and life sciences, as Ireland advances the national Life Sciences Strategy led by the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment.
The learning from this visit now feeds directly into HealthTech Ireland’s active working groups in AI, Digital and Innovation, as well as our strategic HealthTech Connect programme, supporting continued closer alignment between health service priorities and innovation capability for impact. We will continue to work with Health Service Executive innovation leads across the emerging innovation framework pillars to help support their work to translate intent into implementation through shared learning, clinical insight and industry experience.
This work only functions as a connected network. Ireland has the ingredients for success and days like this show what becomes possible when that network is activated with trust, leadership and shared intent.
Thank you to Medtronic for hosting and to all who attended and contributed to an open and constructive conversation.
