When Invest4Health started on January 2-23, the consortium was driven by a shared vision: to incentivise a shift from hospital-centric care to smart capacitating investment in health promotion and disease prevention at scale across multiple levels with sustainable returns and localised benefits. The first 18 months saw an immense effort to get people and processes in place to (i) gather knowledge and strengthen a working concept of smart capacitating investment (ii) decide how to apply that insight to SCI and combination with related tools and methodologies (iii) to ready the initial testbeds to pilot selected SCI compliant models and tools to a chosen health promotion or disease prevention intervention (iv) integrating and utilising local data to inform participatory governance with citizens through local collaboration spaces (v) getting consortium members and stakeholders involved to buy-in to the need for and remit of a funded Citizen and Patient Advisory Group, which has developed to common practice in most other EU projects with similar needs and objectives.
If this preparation period sounds like all went smoothly, it did not. It was an iterative process with some issues having to be revisited more than once: the need for the CPAG; if we are looking to develop and test a specific SCI business model and finance model or existing SCI compatible models, resolve tensions between academic concepts and operational challenges; reminding partners that the testbed pilots need to focus on combining participatory governance and responsible governance in financial decision making for prioritised local interventions. In short, several knowledge threads emerged and needed collective sense-making to tie up or continue to follow. Such learning and insights are significant results from the Invest4Health project and should be valued as such. We expect similar “friction” to appear when additional regions interested in the SCI-related results are invited and engaged in the dissemination efforts.
As we move forward, we need to pay attention to the implementation insights mentioned above, piloting and revising the SCI concept, building a library of validated business and finance models that are SCI compatible, reaching out to a second tranche of regions, and building a social franchise model and offering to help scale and replicate what I4H is developing. In thinking about how this is all pitched to stakeholders, it is suggested that I4H frames our offering as securing collaborative advantage for societal and economic benefits.
