Healthcare Matters

I was reminded yesterday in a wonderfully brief and practical presentation on innovation delivered by Ms. Naomi Fried, PhD (Boston Children’s first and only Chief Innovation Officer), that the dictionary definition of innovation is “a process for trying out new ideas” and that the antonym is “stagnation.”

Fostering innovation needs to become a cultural discipline and SCM professionals who embrace it can stake out what the leading providers have already designated as critical turf –and what surely is becoming another path to senior executive status.  Steve Jobs often pointed out that innovation and leadership go hand-in-hand and are easily and quickly distinguished from the followers, whose grip on the status quo is isolating at best and organizational poison at its worse.

Ask most CEOs where they expect to “source innovation” and they’ll talk about co-development projects with their partners and embracing new ideas from existing and/or new suppliers. Ask an “old breed” buyer who relishes his/her role as the company “gatekeeper” and you’ll get a blank stare. We need to fix that.

Distinguishing innovation as either incremental, and therefore analogous to continuous improvement, from the truly “disruptive” kind that leads to a new way of doing things, is critical to developing a comprehensive approach. Ms. Fried has done an outstanding job defining a process that is proactive and inspires, rewards and supports both kinds of innovative behavior. It’s a process that is tailor made for healthcare.

The Model:

• Initiation: This is the phase where a problem that needs to be solved has been identified.  Put another way, it’s the area of focus that a more innovative approach may fix.

• Ideation: The “brainstorming phase.” Simple enough, but Ms. Fried put a lot of emphasis on investigating how other industries have solved the same or similar problem.  For example, airlines installed self-serve kiosks to shorten check-in wait times/long lines. Could kiosks work in healthcare?

• Piloting or testing a hypotheses: We’re pretty much following the scientific method here, so with that in mind, it’s important to clearly define your objectives and make sure that the goal posts don’t move.  In addition, it’s essential to accept and appreciate that a failed hypothesis is perfectly fine. In fact, the quicker the better. Learning is always a good outcome.

• Transition to operationalization:  A multi-faceted challenge that has to consider organizational constraints –including budgets and cultural mores. Ms. Fried suggested an approach not unlike the path that marketers take when they’re doing their highest-level and early segmentations.  A careful deployment strategy always identifies and engages the known early adopters and other directly impacted parties (e.g. physicians and nurses) as early as possible in the process.  The ideation phase was suggested as a logical starting point.

• Operationalization: Implement and monitor.  Is it working? Did we get it right?

• Optimize: Real world user experiences usually yield the incremental improvements –and those tweaks can be the difference makers.  Obviously then, the process shouldn’t just accommodate such minor change; it should solicit feedback with an expectation that there’s room for improvement.

• Obsolete the innovation: In a continuous improvement context, nothing is sacred. From a very practical perspective, maybe workflow has changed or a vendor presents a more innovative solution to the same problem.  An innovative culture interprets obsolescence as inevitable.

But Boston Children’s didn’t stop here.  Ms. Fried instituted an “Innovation Acceleration Program” (IAP) to make sure the process isn’t just an academic exercise.  It’s not enough to talk about it; to inspire grass roots innovation requires promoting and providing the right kinds of resources to support it. For example, in addition to time, money and space, Boston Children’s actually provides shared access to software development and other appropriate resources.

Ms. Fried correctly points out that changing an employee’s fear of failure is a major and fundamental hurdle. We all understand the problem. It brought back memories of a sales speech I once gave where it occurred to me that fear of success is pretty much the same thing. We intuitively appreciate the need to push forward –and smart providers are institutionalizing processes that guarantee it.

NOTE: To learn more about The Innovation Lifecycle, watch Naomi Fried’s presentation at the Healthcare Innovation Pioneers event. VIDEO: Naomi Fried, PhD – The Innovation Lifecycle: How Innovation Happens in Healthcare

–Tom Finn