Empowering patients to innovate: the case of patient innovation

Placing the patient at the centre of healthcare management, empowering his preferences and decisions, valuing his role in follow-up and disease management is a recent trend. Patients and patient associations are leading awareness campaigns, education and training and even trials with new drugs and strategies. Although, innovation has until recently been seen as a product and outputpredominantly from labs and companies, recent research has shown that many patients and non-professional caregivers develop solutions to cope with their health disorders (Oliveira et al., 2015). However, patient innovation has low diffusion beyond its developer and consequently offers limited benefit to other potential users.