Despite calls for new business and delivery models for hospitals, healthcare leaders find it difficult to turn different perspectives, priorities and approaches into innovative ways to provide care, Quartz reported. For a new way of doing business, leaders can follow four steps that boost hospital innovation and improve patient care:
1. Innovate from the outside in
Hospitals should make customers' needs a major driver of improvement and develop innovations with a strong external focus, the article noted. That echoes the recommendations of Peter Thomond, M.D., who wrote in the Guardian that feedback from patients and the public is crucial and should be central to service improvement and transformation efforts, FierceHealthcare previously reported.
2. Play on the same team
Hospital stakeholders, including administrators, hospitalists, specialists, nurses and regulators, must work together so innovative opportunities don't get lost, Quartz noted. Consider the cautionary tale of a leading hospital whose innovation teams failed to control costs due to four different leaders giving inconsistent directions. Once the four leaders spoke with one voice, the innovation teams produced results.
3. Devote resources to innovation
To ensure innovation efforts will move forward, hospital leaders must focus resources accordingly, the article noted. For example, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah, a nonprofit system of 22 hospitals, and University of Pennsylvania Medical Center devoted people, time and money to healthcare innovation, hiring outside help proficient in healthcare transformation and enabling people at various levels to target innovation opportunities, the article noted.
4. Create innovation-culture alignment
To change the way hospitals do business, the innovation process needs to align with the hospital's priorities and culture, according to Quartz. Culture alignment plays a big role in UPenn Hospital's innovation process, where staff, customers and suppliers are asked to submit innovation ideas. Similarly, leaders at UCLA Health System in Los Angeles understand innovation is more about cultural change and implementation than the technology or invention itself.
For more:
- here's the Quartz article