Unlocking innovation: Overcoming barriers for healthcare providers

Healthcare systems across Europe face a critical dilemma. While innovative solutions emerge at an accelerating pace, their adoption within hospitals remains slow, fragmented, and often ineffective. This growing gap raises one of the most urgent questions in healthcare innovation today: how can we dismantle the barriers that prevent hospitals from effectively adopting and scaling innovation?To help address these challenges, Civitta Slovakia as an EIT Health representative in Slovakia is organizing EIT Health Morning Health Talks (MHT) on Wednesday, May 28, 2025 in Bratislava. 

MHT serves as a platform for cross-sector dialogue, bringing together key stakeholders from academia, hospitals, startups, the Ministry of Health, investors, MedTech innovators, and pharmaceutical companies. This ecosystem event is dedicated to advancing open innovation in healthcare by examining collaborative frameworks, fostering strategic partnerships, and identifying funding pathways that enable the delivery of tangible, meaningful impact across the sector.

This session will kick off with insights from Romania’s Digital Innovation Zone, showcasing practical models of collaboration between hospitals and innovators that have already delivered measurable outcomes. Their experience highlights not just what is possible, but how to make innovation stick within the healthcare environment.

We will then take a closer look at what healthcare providers truly need to bring innovation into practice. Hospitals continue to operate under immense pressure due to workforce shortages and inadequate working conditions, making the case for innovation more urgent than ever. Yet, the uptake of new solutions is often hindered by structural obstacles, lack of internal capacity, and misaligned incentives. Effective collaboration between sectors remains rare, and many initiatives fail to move beyond isolated pilots. To break this cycle, we must design environments where testing and validation are not one-off experiments but integral, repeatable components of hospital operations.

In addition, the event will offer networking opportunities, fostering meaningful exchanges among stakeholders from across the healthcare ecosystem.  These exchanges are intended to foster collaboration and catalyze new partnerships that can advance healthcare innovation.

If you have any questions about the Morning Health Talks, please contact: [email protected]