Health and health care have witnessed a tremendous explosion of innovation over the last several decades. New technologies, new procedures, and new ways of connecting people and information all have the potential to transform health and medicine.
In 2003, RWJF created the Pioneer Portfolio—a clear commitment to harnessing this pipeline of emerging ideas to serve the social good. Our work complements the more targeted efforts of the Foundation’s other teams.
The Pioneer Portfolio is uniquely suited to invest in innovation at many different stages. We seek to:
- Identify and explore new issues and approaches.
- Accelerate progress on issues and approaches that have significant potential to create breakthroughs in health and health care.
- Support projects that use original, unconventional, or cross-sectoral approaches to create transformative change.
We're exploring new ways to connect patients and doctors to help manage chronic disease through Project HealthDesign.
OpenNotes makes it easy for patients to see their doctor visit notes and engage with their health and health care.
Open to New Ideas
While most people think of innovation as a “lightning strike” of creative genius, transformative ideas rarely come out of nowhere. We are helping to identify ideas in the early stages and help develop them along the way.
Team members discuss their search for new ideas that have the potential to transform health and health care.
What is a pioneering idea?
Just what kind of projects does the Pioneer Portfolio fund? As a team, we have created our grantmaking strategy around a very intentional set of activities designed to help us find innovators and innovations with the potential to drive exponential change in health and health care.
We invest in processes and practices that nurture innovation and breakthroughs. We want to network with others who share our passion for health and health care, as well as those in other sectors whose insights might shed new light on the most thorny issues in our field.
For instance:
- You’ll find team members at conferences in places such as as Health FOO ("Friends of O'Reilly"), an "unconference" organized by O'Reilly Media. At this self-organizing event, attendees create an open agenda on the spot.
- We have made grants to Ashoka Changemakers to create an online competition that crowdsources solutions to pressing health and health care challenges.
We also make numerous grants—of relatively small amounts—that help us learn about and experiment in new areas. These initial explorations allow the Pioneer team to venture into new fields and ways of approaching problems.
For instance:
- We recently made a grant to help behavioral economists, choice theorists, and others studying habit formation examine new ideas for helping people make healthier decisions.
- We’re funding a seminar series that examines placebos and their potential to improve health care delivery and patient well-being.
We are also making a handful of broader commitments to areas of exploration we feel hold promise for producing big breakthroughs. When the Pioneer team has a clear hypothesis about how we can make progress in a given field, we make a number of grants over a set period time to help grow that field or help it rise to the next level.
For instance:
- We have funded a broad exploration of the power that gaming might have in improving health and health care.
- We are exploring the field “real-world, real-time” data—data generated by patients in the “real world,” not in a clinical setting. What value might this type of data realistically hold for patients, providers, researchers, and public health officials?
Finally, we nurture a limited number of individual breakthrough ideas that have the potential to create transformational change in health and health care. But “breakthrough” can be difficult to define. So just what do these types of ideas look like? Some of Pioneer's most successful projects have been:
- Transformational—ideas that have the potential to bring about radical, not incremental, change.
- Future-oriented—ideas that look to tomorrow to solve health and health care challenges today.
- Transferable—ideas that either address a large-scale problem or can be adapted to other contexts and can address a wide range of issues.
- Original—ideas that are fresh and new, or represent a novel application of an established idea or approach.
- Unconventional—ideas that challenge traditional thought and practice by viewing the problem–and/or the solution–through a different lens.
- Interdisciplinary—ideas that bring in perspectives and approaches from other industries or draw together nontraditional partners.
For instance:
- Project ECHO is a disruptive (yet simple) model for health care training and delivery that allows remote primary care providers to access specialized knowledge and manage complex chronic conditions formerly outside their expertise. It is changing how primary care providers can treat very sick patients who previously did not have access to specialty care.
The Pioneer team welcomes the lively exchange of ideas that will allow us to move toward the future, working together to solve the challenges facing us in health and health care. If you have an idea or project you feel fits with our strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to join the conversation on the Pioneering Ideas blog—or follow us on Twitter.
Our research into health games explores the power that gaming might have in improving health and health care.
We're creating a pipeline of emerging ideas to serve the social good.
The RPGEH biobank will contribute to a better understanding of how genetic factors, lifestyles, behavior, and environment can interact to affect a person's health.
We invest in processes and practices that nurture innovation and breakthroughs.
Project ECHO expands access to specialty care by developing communities of practice to spread new medical knowledge and apply it to patient care.