Roadmap for Research and Innovation in Health Technology

ITECH project contributes to the need of a Pan European strategy for the optimization of the uptake of research and innovation in the field of health technologies. Focusing in the fields of medical devices and eHealth applications, ITECH aims to identify throughout Europe gaps and barriers currently existing at all stages of the 'idea-to-market' process and to propose a strategy to accelerate and support this process. The ITECH model has been defined to capture the idea to market process in the field of health technologies. Five distinct phases have been identified: Proof of Concept, Prototype Development, Regulatory Processes, Product Development and Reimbursement. The ITECH model has been mapped to the TRL model, widely used in the industry sector where research and innovation are essential steps towards success. The data collection methodology was based on surveys collected from 22 contact nodes from the 22 countries. CNR-IPCB (ex IMCB) was the contact node for Italy. The contact nodes had to collect data on existing funding bodies in each country and successful/unsuccessful stories of products which reached or not the market.