Evaluating project outcomes

In the wake of the Bone Innovation Summit, the partners of the projects BFCC and BONEBANK came together in a final meeting on February 14th, 2019 in Lübeck, Germany to evaluate their projects’ results (click here to read more on the jointly hosted Bone Innovation Summit).
BONEBANK, a project funded by the Interreg Deutschland-Danmark programme, built up a German-Danish biobank and innovation platform for stem cells in bone regeneration. Consequently, both projects cooperate with similar, sometimes identical, institutions and organisations and were keen to learn from each other’s experiences. Bringing together the different project consortia was a great opportunity in terms of strengthening the network of health experts in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) and supporting knowledge transfer.
During the meeting, the BFCC partners emphasised in various presentations the BFCC project’s achievements which concern particularly

• the establishment of the fracture registry with regard to all necessary aspects like IT and data protection as well as the registry’s usability,
• the BFCC as a starting point for innovation from hospital perspective and
• the BFCC as an opportunity to gain insights on the needs of the industry the industry for the improvement of health care in the BSR.
Additionally, in the lifetime of both single projects, the partners developed or used as well as tested innovative medical devices. For example, Bindex® – a handheld device for a quick and accurate estimation of bone mineral density (osteoporosis) made by BFCC project partner Bone Index Finland Ltd. was focus of BFCC’s diagnostics pilot. Furthermore, the harvesting device for bone marrow stem cells was developed by the project partner Stryker Trauma within the BONEBANK project. This intensive collaboration with companies from industry will go on beyond the projects’ lifetime.
To pave the way for the success of future projects, the joint project meeting also included a workshop where the participants could evaluate the projects in regard to different success factors like cooperation, communication as well as the project management.
Altogether, the partnership of both projects proved to be quite strong and also facing challenges was not seen as an obstacle but rather as a chance to work on the improvement of the collaboration network. From BFCC side, the project partners confirmed their high interest on an on-going cooperation to further simplify the registry platform, especially referring to the data entry processes, and to expand their knowledge and research on bone healing.
Hence, the BFCC partners are looking forward to the decision making regarding the project’s application for an extension stage- the BFCC Hub.