Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’
More on Innovation – The Need for Actionable Ideas
May 25, 2011
An excellent post on Venture Valkyrie discusses why Innovation is not enough in healthcare. The author views that “there is no doubt that innovation is necessary to respond to the challenges of our current healthcare system” while “over-breeding of ideas that are innovative but not actionable.” It is important to consider innovation not just a good in itself, especially in healthcare where we are trying to impact personal health, as only good if it leads to real change. Some innovation will always fail, so the encouragement toward innovation should not have barriers that are too high, but realistic evaluation of these ideas, testing their viability, needs to occur.
Another note on innovation comes from the site udemy, a site which enables the creation of courses. Check out Ideas Come From Everywhere, a course by Marissa Mayer of Google, Inc. which she gave to Stanford Technology Ventures Program in 2006. It is certainly not dated and presents some of basic concepts of success through innovation that have made Google a success. Worth watching this short clips.
See this article from Forbes on Gladwell on Innovation: Truths & Confusions which tells a brief history of innovation but also distinguishes between innovators and creators but ends on a positive note that creators (who may come up with ideas but not successfully implement them) can become innovators.
Also posted at WikEhealth.
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Promoting Healthcare Innovation through Challenges
May 18, 2011
Innovation in healthcare is now pervasive. To continue the wave of innovation, hospitals can now earn new incentives based on competitions. These are government-sponsored, industry-sponsored challenges, and even have the potential for becoming business ventures. Here are some competitions hospitals can enter to help expand industry innovation:
- Health Challenges at Challenge.gov – These include video challenges, National Library of Medicine apps, Flu apps and more. Many offer monetary rewards.
- Health 2.0 Developer Challenge – Developed by the Health 2.0 Conference folks, this includes online challenges and live competitions including a Code-a-Thon which most recently occurred in February A Code-a-Thon is a day long competition to build an application. Winners included a meta-analysis engine, Healthy people 2020 tracker, and an epidemic finder.
- Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2) – This includes everything from equipment sterilization, blue button technology, prosthetics and rehabilitation. It encourages submissions from its own employees, as well as healthcare industry leaders.
A new player in this arena is Innocentive, an online business built around challenge-driven innovation. While not specifically focused on healthcare, it does have a Global Health Pavilion, featuring challenges from cell biology to caregiver communities. These challegnes promote the idea of an Open Innovation Marketplace, which is the topic of its new book.
For each of these healthcare challenge websites, the basic concept is open innovation. By utilizing competition for a financial reward, the government, an NGO, a private sector company and healthcare providers can generate low cost solutions. But the inventor/innovator needs to keep in mind their intellectual property rights if these are not spelled out clearly up front.
Nonetheless , the potential for healthcare innovation and problem solving are yet to be measured. Perhaps someone will some develop a site or app which aggregates these challenges and their successful solutions. Aggregation of healthcare innovation challenges would help inventors find opportunities which are sprouting up from government, conferences and corporations.
This post was originally published on Hospital Impact on May 18, 2011.
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Appropriate Use of Social Media in Healthcare Organizations
April 14, 2011
A question during a presentation on social media in healthcare about the appropriate use of social media in patient care areas. Social media can be an effective tool for engaging patients online. But what about the use of social media in patient care areas. Should nurses, physicians and other healthcare providers be online interacting with colleagues or family during active patient care? With busy clinics and busier hospital units and greater concern about patient safety, is there time for what administrators might view as a distraction? Would you want your nurse to be updating Facebook while you are waiting for post-op pain medication? Yet there may be some advantages to direct caregivers utilizing social media. How about the oncology nurse interacting with the cancer patient discharged last week? Or nurses within a hospital exchanging ideas about improving patient safety? Yet stories of abusive use of social media in health care persist.
Clear answers are hard to come by. Each hospital will need to develop its own policy and implementation of that policy in the use of social media in patient care environments. But when face time with the patient is the highest priority, social media may need to take a back seat.
Slides are here:
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TEDx Maastricht – The Future of Health
April 1, 2011
In anticipation of the International event on April 4, I wanted to share some links. Although many conferences which claim to be futurist meccas for healthcare, this one is bringing together a group of people including a very strong patient perspective which all are thinking innovation. Also, it is completely full and is being simulcasted to several countries.
- Website, speakers
- Some of the attendees via a tool which exploits LinkedIn
- mashup on VPRO
- Simulcast schedule – I am being interviewed at 11:15 local time
Follow tweets at #tedxmaastricht
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Trends from Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Healthcare Sector
March 24, 2011
One addition to my post on this book is the final chapter on trends – 20 in all.
- Hospitals are no longer buildings
- Patient Safety Focus
- Information is everywhere
- Evidenced-based Management
- Healthcare can’t keep up with the rate of scientific discovery
- “Not being sick” to “Being Well”
- Shortage of Professionals
- The information hight gains more and more influence
- Concepts such as P2P and Web 2.0 arrive at the health sector
- Social entrepreneurs take the lead
- Consumer-driven healthcare
- Electronic medical records
- Cost containment will become more and more critical in healthcare
- New actors will appear in the healthcare value chain
- Healthcare will become more and more “vertical”
- Personalize medicine drives the agenda
- Bioinformatics emerge
- Bioconnectivity is the next big thing
- Electronic signature is everywhere
- The triple helix is becoming real – administration, hospitals and universities, venture capital.
Some of these are obvious, others provocative. Are there more to add to the list?
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Hearing Atul Gawande speak about Checklists and Health Policy
March 22, 2011
Atul Gawande
Just returned from live tweeting of Atul Gawande at Cleveland Clinic Ideas and full of quotes and ideas. For instance, the evidence is building for use of checklists showing significant reduction in mortality and complications so that he states that if there was a drug that showed this kind of effect it would be adopted immediately, even faster than Viagra. Gawande also discussed two of his well known New Yorker articles:
- The Cost Conundrum - What a Texas town can teach us about health care
- The Hot Spotters: Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care?
In the end, he challenged the audience and the country to find one hospital which could reduce costs while not causing harm to set a model. He predicted that in the coming hospital wars, the ones which reduced cost while maintaining quality would win and others would lose (close).
Within the provocative statements was the voice of compassion and rediscovering the soul of medicine in the complex, competitive healthcare environment of today.
Check out the twitter feed from the meeting. And his book: The Checklist Manifesto and his checklists.
Final thought – why are hospitals not advertising that they endorse and complete adopt checklists? And why would anyone not have surgery in a hospital that does not use checklists? Why take the risk when the evidence is there?
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On the Bookshelf
February 13, 2011
While I read The Myths of Innovation as an eBook, my next three are all paperbacks:
- Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene
- Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Healthcare Sector: From Idea to Funding to Launch by Luis G. Pareras, MD
- Keys to EMR/EHR Success: Selecting and Implementing an Electronic Medical Record by Ronald B. Sterling.
The last two are Greenbranch Publishing.
Watch for book reviews in the near future.
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Innovation – Segway Style
February 2, 2011
Yesterday I attend the Cleveland Clinic Ideas for Tomorrow presentation by Dean Kamen inventor of the Segway and much more. His current company is called DEKA Research & Development Corporation and has several inventions to meet his goals of saving the planet and solving big problems with simple solutions. Many of these have implications for health but also he has created FIRST, an education initiative to help students become inventors and scientists. Perhaps more important that his inventions is the way that he thinks about innovation and invention. Part of this is within the mission of FIRST, “exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.” He stated, “innovation is mostly about surprises” and lives his life expecting the unexpected. He complained about government regulation which inhibits innovation and has created his own country on an island off Connecticut as an act of rebellion. He scoffs at naysayers and believes in solving global problems. We need more of this in healthcare.
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Using Social Media to Promote Evidence-Based Practice
January 17, 2011
This concept is unique in health care social media. It goes beyond marketing or even engaging customers and on to the real impact on practice. It happens that this may more of a Canadian approach to social media. Freed of much of the health care marketing in the US, tying evidence-based practice to social media goes to the heart of the value of these tools. Perhaps it is also the influence of Cochrane on evidenced based practice in Canada and the UK and EU.
On a side note, check out Spigit, a new company all about innovation. Not specific to health care but if you look toward Canada again to the Innovation Cell. See also this post from TechCrunch on visualization in innovation. More on innovation soon for a book review on The Myths of Innovation.
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Year in Review – Books of 2010
December 31, 2010
Following Kent Bottle’s lead in influential books in 2010, I decided to compose my own list:
- Chasing Medical Miracles The Promise and Perils of Clinical Trials. Tells it like it is – to be a participant in a clinical trial.
- Googled-The End of the World as We Know It – somewhat disappointing in that it discussed the advertising side of the business and less about the history of its technical evolution.
- DIYU: Epunks, Edupeneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. This book was recommended by a speaker at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia. Questions the future viability of universities as they are undermined by Web 2.0 technology.
- Leading Geeks – Required reading for anyone who manages geeks, especially programmers. Helpful for anyone to understand the culture of geekdom, understanding the mindset of managing ambiguity and tearing down some stereotypes.
- The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil – mind blowing futurism and undying optimism in technology even though this is from 2005 and 650 pages. The law of accelerating returns puts us on a fast track to the future. I am now following Kurweil’s Accelerating Intelligence blog.
- A Little Booklet About Health 2.0 – by Lucien Engelen. Brief but advancing health 2.0 concepts with a peak to the future from a European perspective.
- Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More – this lead to my blog post on Partnerships with Online Communities – The Long Tail, discussing some of the implications of the long tail in healthcare.
- The Collapse of Complex Societies – a venture into history and anthropology which I enjoy and blogged about: Declining Marginal Returns of Complexity
- Laugh, Sing and Eat Like a Pig by e-Patient Dave – a personal, signed gift from Dave himself when he visited Cleveland and had dinner with us.
- Connected for Health: The KP HealthConnect Story – Probably the best story of successful implementation of an EMR on a large scale basis with honest, realistic discussion of struggles and successes.
- Program or Be Programmed – Ten Commandments of the Digital Age – read appropriately as an ebook, makes some good points without being paranoid about technology’s growing role in our lives.
- The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can be Done About It. Recommended by @Ciscoiii when visiting the World Bank in Washington, DC. Excellent analysis of failed states with recommendations at the UN level for solutions.
- Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom – found this in Philadelphia at the Liberty Bell bookstore.
One on my shelf is Reading in the Brain: the New Science of How We Read.
More book reviews to come next year and many more will be on my Sony Reader.
