Thousands of health care professionals are working in health care institutions, fully dedicated to providing high quality health care. During their work, they regularly come up with ideas ‘for making health care better ’.
Innovative professionals who want to realize their ideas in their own hospital or beyond will experience that the innovation process in hospitals is full of pitfalls and traps. There are many stakeholders that need to be involved and persuaded to get their commitment for changing attitude and working methods. Implementation of innovations in hospitals is challenging and fails in many cases due to focus on the new (technical) product or treatment and a lack of attention for the professional environment in which the innovation has to be rolled out and implemented.

PontesNL is an independent national program founded by Luuk Evers of Pontes Medical (formerly UMC Utrecht) and Joep Welschen of stichting MedtechPartners. Luuk developed with his team the Pontes method and was able during the past 14 years to get more than 10 successful innovative products to the market from scratch (starting from a researcher or care professional with a first idea). Within PontesNL the Pontes method is combined with the 14 years experience of stichting MedtechPartners to speed up the innovation process for Dutch medtech and digital health innovations. Pontes means ‘bridges’ and that’s what innovation needs: we bridge the gaps between stakeholders who need to be involved in order to develop and implement innovations successfully.

Pontes houses

To enable innovation, hospitals should support the innovative professionals and scientists with an innovation infrastructure containing a method with clear project steps and easy access to all stakeholders that need to be involved.
Hospitals or care organizations are invited to become a member of PontesNL and as a ‘Pontes house’ start building the innovation infrastructure and learning the Pontes methodology by using our:

• Support for innovation managers in order to improve the internal innovation organisation and processes
• Access to our network, formats and tools 
• Quarterly innovation managers meeting
• Three times a month custom 1:1 support

Pontes impact support

Hospitals are facing big transitions and challenges. We help hospital organizations to use the power of innovative action for their challenges. Our offer:

• Custom support in order to assist hospital organizations in realizing their ambitions
• Knowledge and vision of the actual available technology- and behavioral innovation options
• 14 years hands-on experience with care professionals, innovation developers and business
• Proven working method based on 8 common values and 8 essential healthcare principles

Innovators in hospitals have in most cases a medical background and are in most cases not familiar with product development, project stages, value propositions, business cases, stakeholder analysis, cooperation agreements and implementation. They need guidance along all these pitfalls and traps to become successful.     
We offer 1:1 custom support for innovation teams:

• Challenging the idea
• Stakeholders analysis
• Implementation strategy
• Guidance and coaching

PontesNL is LS&H partner of the imec.istart.nl accelerator and fund that offers innovation teams with a TRL 4 product a 18 months custom program and the possibility for a 100 – 250K investment.

Based on our experience in hospitals and startups we oversee the entire project as from first idea until implementation in hospitals. We know how to involve the right expertise at the right time and give access to our network. We strongly advise to integrate all actions that are key for success as from start. For example: start thinking about the requirements and needs of all stakeholders that can influence implementation in a very early stage.  

Spaarne Gasthuis

Mindy Asamoah

PontesNL has supported Spaarne Labs in the development of the internal innovation process. The result is a more effective workflow from idea to experiment. In 1:1 sessions it's great to have PontesNL as a sparring partner for all kind of innovation challenges. During the monthly innovation managers meeting it's fun and valuable to share experiences and knowledge with the innovation managers of the other Pontes houses.

Want to know more? Please contact:

Luuk Evers		Joep Welschen
luuk@pontesnl.nl M +31 6 - 19 21 66 89		joep@pontesnl.nl M +31 6 - 21 53 37 93