Hello! In this week’s post, I am describing the G-BA’s initiative to promote innovation in the German health care system and clinical practice.
What are innovation funds?
One of the tasks of the G-BA is to financially support two types of innovative projects:
- new innovations beyond the SHI-funded standard care (German: “Neue Versorgungsformen”) and
- research projects that aim to improve existing care (German: “Versorgungsforschung”).
To this end, the G-BA had set up so-called “innovation funds”. The money comes from the SHI funds, and the health fund, and is managed by the Federal Office for Social Security.
The innovation committee at the G-BA determines the priorities and criteria to allocate the funds, and decides on the applications for project sponsorships.
Once these projects are completed, the innovation committee develops recommendations on how the innovations or findings from research projects can be integrated into clinical practice.
The G-BA website lists the support announcements and projects for new innovations and healthcare research projects.
New projects for clinical guidelines
In June 2021, the innovation committee had announced that it is looking to sponsor research on clinical guidelines for
- Rare diseases
- Treatment of risk factors for non-transmitted diseases, multimorbidity and improving drug safety for more common diseases
- Treatment of people with special needs (e.g. children, young people, the elderly and/or people in need of care)
- Surgical interventions on the skeletal system / musculoskeletal system.
These topics were determined by the BMG.
The G-BA received 31 applications that were assessed in consultation with medical experts and the AWMF. Finally, they have granted funding to 18 of the 31 projects, which aligned with the requirements set by the innovation committee.
For each of the 18 projects, this overview describes the topic of the clinical guideline and the aim for the development or improvement.
The 18 projects target these guidelines:
- Rare diseases: 4
- Treatment of risk factors for non-transmitted diseases, multimorbidity and improving drug safety for more common diseases: 8
- Treatment of people with special needs (e.g. children, young people, the elderly and/or people in need of care): 5
- Surgical interventions on the skeletal system / musculoskeletal system: 1.
The innovation fund recommends two projects for German routine clinical practice
In June 2022, the G-BA has reviewed the findings from previous innovation projects. They recommended to transfer two of them, one from each of the two categories, into clinical practice.
Project “Rise-up”
The “Rise-up” project fits into category 1 – new innovations beyond the SHI-funded standard care. It helps patients with non-specific back pain in reducing their pain, among other things by using a back app.
Within this project, the patients received close monitoring from GPs and specialists. Prior to that, the project identified their individual risk of the pain becoming chronic. Patients were also able to use a specific back app that included information about the disease and exercise instructions to improve both mental and physical health. After 12 months, the back pain in patients in the project group decreased significantly more than in the control group.
The innovation committee will now pass these findings on to the SHI funds and KVs, so they can consider these in their contracts. In addition, they will share the project results, especially on the questionnaire used to determine the risk of chronification, with various medical professional associations and medical societies.
Project “Pawel”
This project from the second category – research projects that aim to improve existing care – showed how to reduce the number of patients over 70 years of age that are suffering from delirium after an operation. This includes a training concept for those treating people in practices and hospitals, orientation aids for patients, as well as preventive measures and care management.
G-BA’s innovation committee is now passing on the findings to various associations:
- the DKG, in order for hospitals to integrate these into their own delirium prevention measures
- the BÄK, to check if and how to integrate the learnings into the clinician’s training and further education
- the AWMF, to assess if and how to incorporate the findings into S3 clinical guidelines
- the German Nursing Council, and the German Professional Association for Nursing (especially findings on prevention)
- the IQTiG, to check how to include the results in the quality contracts between SHI funds and hospitals.
Further reading related to funding
- Virtual consultations for patients with Covid-19 requiring intensive care introduced into routine clinical practice
- Three new methods were added to the catalogue of SHI funds
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