Shift Health Releases Report Highlighting the Impacts of COVID-19 on the Future of Health Research and Innovation

COVID-19 represents an inflection point for the health research and innovation system.

COVID19 is altering—perhaps irreversibly—the health research and innovation ecosystem by compressing into mere weeks structural and system-level adaptations that might otherwise have evolved over a multi-year, or even generational, timescale. Recognizing that many of these adaptations likely signal a new mindset that will fundamentally reshape research and innovation beyond the pandemic, we have developed a new Health Intelligence report titled, ‘COVID-19 and the Future of Health Research and Innovation’. 

Our report argues that there has never been greater recognition that “science is the solution”, and there has therefore, never been a more fertile moment to reinvigorate investment in health research and innovation and create the best system possible. We will not return to ‘normal’. Shaping the ‘new normal’ will require unprecedented courage, creativity, and collaboration.

The report explores five key phenomena and associated considerations for optimizing health research and innovation in the “new” normal shaped by COVID-19:

1. Data: How do we build on this watershed moment for our health data ecosystem and our use of digital tools?
2. Regulation: How do we renew regulations and practices to uphold standards and accelerate the pace of innovation?
3. Co-operation: How do we enable a research environment that benefits fully from both competition and collaboration?
4. Democracy: How do we continue to earn public trust and foster an accountable, citizen-engaged science?
5. Globalization: How do we optimize the global connections central to research, innovation, and planetary health?

Learn more about the long-term implications of COVID-19 in our Health Intelligence publication here.