Baltic Fracture Competence Centre

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The number of bone fractures and linked health disorders are going to increase in the future due to an ageing society. The project will set up local registries and link them together in one transnational data registry. Hospitals and companies in the Baltic Sea region will use the registry to identify needs and potentials for innovation within fracture management. The industrial sectors for innovation are broad covering implants, pharmaceuticals, imaging, wound care or single use surgery devices. Innovations in these sectors must reduce the total cost of care, or clearly improve the quality of care at a justifiable cost and bring new solutions to medical challenges. Demand for innovation and investments is rising: The European medical technology industry increased their R&D expenditure by 11 % from 2012 to 2013. At the same time, research and innovation (R&I) within fracture management is facing various challenges: understanding clinical needs and effectiveness, reducing costs of innovation and minimising time to market. Clinics and companies often lack insight into the total costs of care, the effectiveness of treatment and the causes of adverse health outcomes in hospitals. To overcome these challenges, clinical fracture registries can provide evidence into the clinical “real world” and reveal needs and potentials for innovation. Furthermore, clinics and hospitals are important actors in the innovation process helping to identify needs and to ensure user-oriented products. Around 50 % of new products are initiated by doctors. Accordingly, companies in the Baltic Sea region (BSR) need direct access to hospitals and doctors for collaboration within needs assessment, preclinical research, product development, clinical trials, post market follow up studies or health technology assessment. Moreover, when doctors exchange best practice across hospitals and across countries, they can improve their clinical procedures. Finally, successful innovation is driven by fast market access across countries. Direct collaboration between doctors and companies facilitates market access in particular for start-ups and small and medium enterprises. The BFCC project responds to these challenges by accelerating transnational collaboration for innovation within fracture management in the BSR. It develops and implements a transnational fracture registry platform of six hospitals from Germany, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, Estonia and Sweden. The registry allows users to compare the treatment process and outcome quality across institutions and countries. This transnational R&I infrastructure fosters the evidence based identification of clinical best practice and needs for innovation. BFCC establishes a transnational collaboration platform between hospitals and industry, which is tested in transnational pilots with hospitals and companies involved.

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