To respond to the ever-changing healthcare environment, hospitals are looking for innovative ways to deliver low-cost, high-quality care.
That means healthcare leaders need to understand innovation is more about cultural change and implementation than the technology or invention itself, Molly Coye, M.D., chief innovation officer for UCLA Health System who oversees the Institute for Innovation in Health, said at a hospital leadership roundtable with Becker's Hospital Review.
"I would define innovation as taking great ideas and pilots and turning them into major changes that accelerate the transformation of a health system," she said.
So how do hospitals turn technology and inventions into services that can solve care delivery problems and improve quality?
Leaders at UCLA and the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus cite collaboration, within and among hospitals. "Finding experts in other sectors to embrace the elements of design, delivery and iteration of these products or solutions is critical for us to create medicine that meets our goal of improving people's lives and realizing value innovation--lower cost, higher quality--in healthcare," Clay Marsh, M.D., chief innovation officer for OSU Wexner, said at the roundtable.
At UCLA, an innovation leadership council made up of senior leadership and program heads decide whether to deploy successful pilots system-wide, Coye noted. UCLA also meets every other month with representatives from other area health systems to share and test ideas and prevent duplicative efforts.
Patient input is another key to turning ideas into changes that transform care, according to David Feinberg, M.D., president of UCLA Health System and CEO of UCLA Hospital System.
"We [involve] patients in everything we do, so we have the voice of the patient institutionalized in all decision-making," he told Becker's. "In all of our quality decisions and innovations, we have formalized a means of including the voice of the patient."
With similar goals in mind, Utah's Intermountain Healthcare launched an innovation lab last week to focus on making care more patient-centric. After innovations--such as a patient room of the future, in which vital signs will be monitored without being tethered to wires--Intermountain will create and test them for use at its facilities, as well as for possible adoption nation-wide, FierceHealthIT previously reported.
For more:
- here's the Becker's article