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From Molecules to Health Systems: A Conceptual Model Explaining Why Scientific Innovation Fails to Improve Patient Outcomes Without Effective Healthcare Delivery Infrastructure

Lucky Ilodigwe, Abimbola Caleb Adesemoye

Abstract

The distance between what biomedical science can achieve and what patients actually experience remains one of the central puzzles of contemporary health policy. Efficacious molecules, devices, diagnostics, and protocols accumulate faster than the health gains they promise, and in many settings a widening gap separates demonstrated efficacy from realized population outcomes. This article advances a conceptual model, from molecules to health systems, that explains why scientific innovation so often fails to improve patient outcomes in the absence of effective healthcare delivery infrastructure. The model reframes an innovation not as a finished good but as latent potential that must be converted into realized health value through a sequence of delivery stages: availability, accessibility, acceptability and adoption, correct and complete provision, and sustained adherence culminating in effective coverage. Because these stages operate in series, their conversion efficiencies combine multiplicatively, so that the population impact of an innovation is bounded by the product of stage-specific efficiencies rather than by its intrinsic efficacy. Three consequences follow. First, delivery systems exhibit compounding attenuation, in which even high performance at each stage yields modest end-to-end realization, and the marginal value of further efficacy gains diminishes as delivery weakens. Second, realized outcomes are governed by the weakest delivery stage, so the binding constraint on impact is typically infrastructural rather than scientific, and the return to relieving that constraint exceeds the return to any other single investment. Third, the loss concentrates among the poorest populations, so delivery weakness is also a mechanism of inequity. Cross-cutting system capacities, including workforce, supply chains, financing, information, governance, and physical facilities, set the conversion efficiency at every stage and therefore determine whether innovation becomes health. The article formalizes the conversion logic, derives six propositions and a sensitivity analysis, proposes a cascade- decomposition method for locating binding constraints, situates the model against diffusion, implementation, health-systems, and effective-coverage scholarship, and sets out a research agenda with implications for research prioritization, investment sequencing, equity, measurement, and the design of innovations.

Keywords

healthcare delivery infrastructure; health systems; implementation science; effective coverage; translational gap; conceptual model; health equity www.iiardpub.org

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