Accelerating Demand-Driven tools for pediatric innovation adoption - A collaborative roadmap for Europe

There is a clear gap in the adoption of paediatric healthcare innovations which continues to hinder the access to such innovations.

Demand-driven policy instruments offer the possibility to overcome market failures and allow risk sharing between co-owners and investors.

These include Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) and Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP), Value-Based Procurement (VBP), and Social Impact Bonds (SIBs). Such demand-driven funding instruments have the potential to reduce the adoption gap in paediatric healthcare. However, these innovative funding tools are rarely used to support paediatric innovation adoption.

This limited adoption of demand-driven funding tools can be attributed to several barriers which are specific to paediatric healthcare, such as the perceived high-risk and complex nature of bringing paediatric innovations to market, fragmented regulatory pathways and market access, limited market demand (low numbers of patients) and perceived small impact.

Additionally, there is poor awareness, knowledge and understanding of demand-driven tools, which results in their underutilisation.

The i4KIDS-LEGACY project will create a holistic innovation action plan in paediatrics to ensure optimal implementation and utilisation of demand-driven innovation financing instruments to support the adoption of paediatric innovation in a coordinated manner across Europe.

The project will:  1) Identify demand-driven financing instruments and mechanisms for paediatric health.2) Collect data on the needs and challenges in the adoption of paediatric innovation.3) Develop working groups to ideate solutions that address the needs and challenges identified.4) Collaboratively build a European action plan to catalyse the use of demand-driven tools for the adoption of paediatric innovation solutions.5)Promote cross-border adoption of paediatric innovations using financial instruments.