Overview

This course offers a comprehensive and structured approach to identifying, validating, prioritizing, and selecting unmet, underserved, and unarticulated needs in healthcare, laying the foundation for meaningful, evidence-based innovation. Using a combination of real-world examples, stakeholder perspectives, and practical tools, learners will explore how to uncover high-impact opportunities that align with clinical, organizational, and policy priorities. Emphasizing both critical thinking and creative problem-solving, the course equips learners to assess the significance, feasibility, and strategic relevance of healthcare challenges, ultimately guiding them toward selecting the right opportunities for innovation. Whether learners plan to work in clinical care, health-tech startups, public health, or healthcare management, this course provides them with foundational tools to recognize and act on the right opportunities for innovation that are feasible, relevant, and aligned with stakeholder needs and systemic realities.

Syllabus

Course Introduction and Module 1: Introduction to Need Identification for Healthcare Innovation

This module lays the foundation for understanding the role of innovation in healthcare and the importance of identifying the right problems to solve. We will explore what healthcare innovation means, why it is critical in today’s evolving landscape, and the challenges and drivers that shape it. We will also learn how to categorize healthcare innovation from groundbreaking innovations to incremental advancements, understand different types of healthcare needs (clinical,operational, patient-centric), and explore the structured process for need identification and opportunity selection. This module will provide both conceptual grounding and real-world illustrations to help learners recognize impactful opportunities for healthcare innovation.

Module 2: Stakeholder Analysis and Engagement

This module focuses on two foundational steps in the process of need identification for healthcare innovation—defining problems effectively and analyzing stakeholder dynamics. You will gain skills to break down complex challenges into clearly articulated problems to identify unmet needs that, in turn, lay the foundation for impactful and sustainable innovation. In addition, we will explore methods for identifying, analyzing, and engaging key stakeholders, including internal actors, such as patients and providers, and external groups, like payers, regulators, and technology partners. Using structured frameworks and practical tools, you will develop the competencies needed to ensure that innovation efforts are aligned with real-world challenges and shaped by the perspectives of the individuals most affected.

Module 3: Methods and Tools for Need Identification

This module aims to equip you with a comprehensive tool kit for systematically identifying unmet needs in healthcare, a critical step in driving innovation. By integrating macro-level analyses, organizational assessments, process evaluations, user-centered techniques, and rigorous research methodologies, this module provides you with a versatile and practical approach to need identification. Through real-world examples and applications, you will gain the ability to systematically analyze complex healthcare environments and uncover high-impact opportunities for innovation. Whether working in a hospital, startup, or academic setting, these tools will help you to identify meaningful needs and drive evidence-based, transformative change.

Module 4: Need Assessment, Validation, Prioritization, and Selection

This module builds a critical bridge between identifying problems in healthcare and transforming them into real-world innovation opportunities. We will focus on ensuring that the identified needs are worth solving; in other words, they are significant, relevant, and feasible within real-world systems. We will then examine structured methods for assessing and prioritizing needs, including the Severity-Prevalence-Feasibility (SPF) analysis, Impact-Effort Matrix, return on investment (ROI) analysis, Health Technology Assessment (HTA), and stakeholder-centered tools, like the MoSCoW Method and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). Finally, we will explore how strategic alignment, resource availability, risk, and timing influence final need selection.