Five Ways Healthcare Leaders Can Encourage Innovation
Innovation is never by accident. It takes deliberate and strategic actions to create effective change. For healthcare service providers, embracing some of these critical changes is becoming necessary for any system. Here are some methods healthcare leaders can embrace to enhance innovation.
As with most other sectors of the economy, organizations in the healthcare industry are increasingly implementing creative ideas, programs, and interesting technological advancements which can generate value and make access to services and products easier for customers.
An example is the shift to value-based reimbursement and the concomitant redesign of healthcare delivery processes and infrastructure.
However, too many practitioners are either unwilling or unable to approach innovation with the gusto and strategy that could help them drive big improvements in their patient experience and bottom line.
Despite this inertia, we see examples such as multispecialty medical group, CareMount Medical whose President and CEO, Scott D. Hayworth, MD mentioned that innovation has always been of utmost importance to the organization, and that trying new things is the reason the organization’s base has grown to 650,000 active patients, 500 doctors, and 650 providers overall.
The intent behind innovation is to improve competitiveness, stakeholder ROI and entrench a culture of solving big problems. Hence, it is critical to innovate now more than ever as we shift to value-based care.
The following five ways are strategies healthcare leaders and health systems can look to improve their competitive positions over the coming years
- Create an Innovation Culture
Healthcare organizations should encourage their personnel to deliberately pursue improvements in service quality and solutions at all times. There can't be an innovative healthcare organization which doesn't encourage and celebrate new ideas. Where possible, they should also create innovation centers, where various stakeholders can exchange ideas.
Furthermore, in the transition to value-based care there is a demand to fundamentally rethink long-ingrained processes. This may mean discovering that existing workflows may be dated for a value-based care environment - you have to rethink all existing workflows that drive core outcome and control costs.
2. Put a Structure to Your Strategy
Creating ad hoc innovation activities is never enough. Innovation must be put together with initiatives tailored to specific areas of need and must have the ability to scale up promising applicable programs.
This explains why it is critical to formalize innovation strategy. This strategy must be top-down as it must involve the leadership support, else you will just be hitting your head on the wall.
After you have that strategy in play, you must identify fertile fields - these are areas with massive need in the organization.
3. Think 'out-of-the-box' for Funding
As innovation is pursued, healthcare organizations, large or small, can embrace innovative ways of fostering and financing new projects.
For instance, IT vendors that offer more than just the standard buy-sell relationship are an opportunity for cost savings on processes
Another method is to identify partners who can be leveraged to improve the organization’s innovation strategy. For example, smaller hospitals can reach out to academic medical centers to avail themselves resources and experience - smart partnerships is an innovative way to do a lot of heavy lifting for organizations with fewer resources.
4. Pilot to Launch
Starting small and scaling up helps control risk, minimize cost and optimize results over time. Pilot projects and iterative models are the way to go.
Hence, you can test small projects in a controlled environment instead of steering the Titanic.
5. Innovate through collaboration
Innovation rarely happens without removing artificial divides. This could be evolving team-based and integrated care or advancing patient-centered population health management. The most beneficial advances in the healthcare system have recognized collaboration as an initiative that works.
So when looking to drive innovation, it's valuable to promote an interdisciplinary innovation team.
A quick-win example in fostering collaboration is having walls between research and clinical operations removed. Healthcare systems separate these two such that one has nothing to do with the other, however, with innovation, everything involves collaboration.
In conclusion, the healthcare industry can continue to thrive with innovation in the mix. However, the work is in implementing innovative strategies that also cut through to operations and processes. As a healthcare leader, it is important to understand the right methods to strategically encourage innovation in your system.
These five ways should give youa headway.
