Disruptive vs. Frugal Innovation in Healthcare: Distinctions, Convergence, and Relevance Across Health Systems

Healthcare systems globally face a plethora of problems. Healthcare delivery systems are unable to cope with the increased demand by non-communicable diseases, an aging population, and patients with multiple morbidities. To remedy the crisis, countries are subsequently increasing their healthcare budgets dramatically. Healthcare expenditure has grown 20 per cent per capita over the past ten years in the United Kingdom, 40 per cent in the United States, and 200 per cent in Singapore. These issues cannot be solved by just increasing the funding in healthcare systems. In fact, funding is just a temporary solution too Funding cannot resolve the limited capacity and lack of sustainable funding from the government (Christensen, 2015). This highlights the need for disruptive innovation that utilizes new and innovative healthcare delivery models and systems. This creates an opportunity for true convergence and inter-linking of technology, health, genetics, business, psychological, economic and sociological remodelling, all of which can stimulate disruptive innovation. Finally, in today’s healthcare environment, frugal innovation is certainly required as most other innovations would mean increased spending on healthcare systems. To address the problem of cost, the healthcare sector must embrace frugal innovation (Budryk, 2015).