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Innovation: The Common Ground in the Healthcare Vendor/Provider Space

Jennifer Dennard, E-Media Marketing Specialist
August 19, 2010

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The word ‘innovation’ has become more ubiquitous than ever. Companies in every industry have adopted its principles in an effort to stay on the cutting edge of product development. Some throw the word around in an effort to generate buzz. Others ingrain it into the mission of their organizations so wholeheartedly that teams, centers and careers develop out of it. “A search of … LinkedIn found that more than 700 people listed their current job title as ‘chief innovation officer’ and that nearly 25,000 had the word ‘innovation’ in their job title,” according to a recent article on NewYorkTimes.com.

“The word ‘innovation’ wouldn’t have shown up anywhere [a few decades ago],” says Dr. Nicholas La Russo, Medical Director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation (CFI). “I think what’s happened in the last decade or two is that innovation has increasingly been taught. It’s been analyzed. It’s been written about. It’s hard to pick up a copy of Fast Company or the Harvard Business Review without seeing something about innovation.”

And he’s right. A recent Harvard Business Review blog, “Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation,” notes that 80 percent of CEOs surveyed believe business is becoming so complex that it demands new, innovative ways of thinking. Less than 50 percent believe their companies are effectively equipped for this complexity.

It’s obvious that the idea can’t be ignored, and those in the healthcare industry are certainly taking note. As healthcare reform creates a strong sense of urgency, this need for new processes is greater than ever.

Vendors Strive to Innovate for Life
Companies in the healthcare vendor arena like Medtronic and Siemens have made innovation a highly visible part of their missions.

Medtronic - an international biomedical company that develops technologies to aid patient treatment - includes Strategy and Innovation in its key businesses, and maintains a commitment to “ innovating for life” by developing new therapies to treat a wide range of conditions. Through its innovation arm, it even provides healthcare organizations with tools to help them improve operational efficiency and quality of care, increase patient outreach and optimize therapy spend. Medtronic advocates innovation through collaboration with physicians, scientists and engineers, and even goes so far as to solicit innovative ideas from the medical community at large via the Innovate with Medtronic portal on its website.

Siemens - a global provider of financial and clinical software solutions for healthcare IT - currently invests 9 to 11 percent of its annual revenues on research and development, and its more than 5,000 employees in R&D generate an average of five patents a day. This investment decision has enabled it to achieve a number of goals and accolades, including winning the 2010 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Technology Leadership of the Year.

Its recent customer education symposium, Innovations ’10, was a clear reflection of Siemens’ commitment to “continuous innovation that produces technology-driven solutions to help healthcare providers advance healthcare.”

Like Medtronic, Siemens believes in innovation through collaboration. At the symposium, the company announced the winners of its 2010 Inspired Healthcare Outcomes Challenge, a competition that recognizes the healthcare providers that have achieved notable outcomes or implemented new best practices through the use of Siemens healthcare information technology.

Providers Strive to Innovatively Transform Healthcare
Providers are no different when it comes to adopting innovative principles and programs. Healthways, a provider of specialized comprehensive healthcare solutions, recently developed social gaming programs to enable people to take better care of themselves and reduce employers’ healthcare costs along the way.

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The Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation's Design Studio

The Mayo Clinic, the renowned non-profit teaching hospital, is even getting into the social act. It’s set to launch a social media center next month, and has even developed the Mayo Clinic Island in the 3D world of Second Life. The virtual environment allows users to attend lectures on cancer and heart disease, and conferences on colon cancer and thoracic aortic aneurysms.

The clinic’s Center for Innovation opened in 2008 in response to the “growing recognition that innovation efforts in companies and organizations were being consolidated to some degree; and a recognition that having a group responsible for educating, promoting and nurturing innovation within the organization would be a good thing,” says Dr. LaRusso. “I think it reflects the vision and strategy of Mayo to influence healthcare transformation and the need to put some boundaries around that and accountability.”

Current projects at the center include creating a healthcare system tailor-made for a specific community, or as Dr. LaRusso puts it, “patient-centered, community based healthcare reengineering.” A pilot project based on this notion has been in development in Austin, Minn. The project hopes to determine whether an integrated community-based healthcare system involving citizens, community leaders, employers and governments can produce healthier citizens.

“Care in this country by and large is fragmented,” Dr. LaRusso explains. “Many people believe that the new model of healthcare has to be based around a primary care team involving not only physicians but other providers, coordinators and individuals whose jobs have yet to be determined. The umbrella term for what I’m talking about is called the Patient Centered Medical Home. Our approach to that is to not only recognize the elements that have been identified as necessary for implementation, but to add a number of components that reflects Mayo’s special focus on the patient.”

Healthcare reform has created a sense of urgency among the healthcare market, and Dr. LaRusso says that though many of the CFI’s programs would have been undertaken regardless of reform, the center is “keeping an eye on elements of that reform bill so that we can adapt, adjust and align some of the changes that we’re involved with, including some of the dollars that are going to be available for successful change in the delivery system.”

The CFI has a great relationship with Kaiser Permanente’s Sidney R. Garfield Innovation Center, which, like the Mayo Clinic, uses principles of human-centered design to improve physical spaces, technologies and clinical operations. The CFI’s upcoming Transform Symposium will feature a number of presenters and speakers from the Garfield center.

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Rooms at Kaiser Permanente's Garfield center are equipped with teleconferencing in an effort to transform a TV into an interactive patient care device and kiosk.
It helps accelerate the introduction of telemedicine, and enables doctors to make virtual rounds.

The Garfield center was launched in 2006 “to support collaboration across multiple disciplines,” explains Jennifer Leibermann, director of the center. “Its creation as a safe, neutral zone allows Kaiser Permanente’s frontline staff and members to step away from the distractions of day to day clinical operations (and the self-imposed mental valleys that people often fall into), allowing them to open their minds to new possibilities.

“We've also found that when we tell a group of line clinicians that we are bringing them to the organization's innovation center, it provides a certain cache and reinforcement that their ideas and diverse perspectives are incredibly valuable. The entire mission of the Garfield Center is to engage end-users,” she adds, “the care teams providing care and patients who are involved - to create innovations that improve the entire patient experience. Because these innovations are designed by end users, they are widely spread and sustainable.”

Where Vendors and Providers Meet
The center recently hosted its first Innovation Workshop for non-Kaiser employees due to an overwhelming demand from outside organizations. Titled Innovation and Improvement in Process, Space and Planning, the two-day workshop taught attendees about its unique methodology and prototyping capabilities.

Matthew Browning, RN, CEO of YourNurseIsOn.com - an awarding-winning healthcare communications software platform that automates vacant shift fulfillment notifications and important organizational messages - attended the workshop because he “wanted to learn more about the process of innovation from leading experts and have the chance to collaborate with the motivated healthcare change agents that were in attendance.”

Browning first visited the center in 2009, and became fascinated with the innovation process as envisioned and practiced at the Garfield center. He came away from his most recent visit “with a greater respect for … the methodical, continuous improvement, human-centered design approach to managed innovation. We will use many parts of this approach with its brainstorming, body storming, ‘ fail fast’ and ‘low fidelity’ concepts to continually refine our products, services and entire organization.

“The concepts concerning the adoption, spread and measure of innovation will also be useful, especially as Meaningful Use guidelines continue to evolve,” Browning adds. “The use of technology to achieve improved efficiencies, increase staff and patient safety, ensure continuity of operations, realize improved organizational communication and response capabilities will be welcome innovations in healthcare. Our company decided to meet these challenges by innovating solutions in conjunction with industry leading healthcare systems, hospitals and leaders. We have embraced human-centered design processes and remained responsive and nimble to meet customer needs.

“Being a technology company lends itself to an ‘innovate or die’ mentality. Our company prefers to embrace the possibilities of the future, to innovate solutions for healthcare and to ‘ innovate and thrive.’”

For more information about how market research can help expedite innovative products and processes to market, see "Market Research Ensures Innovation Makes it to Market" .







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