Do Healthcare Innovation Centers Deliver?

The new thing in sick care administration is to create healthcare innovation centers, modeled somewhat after other industry R/D and skunkworks. Their goal, ostensibly, is to innovate our way out of the sick care and health care mess. They focus mostly on quality, cost and access to care and range in size, scope and vision.

As you would expect, there are now conferences, webinars and white papers about health innovation centers, best practices and their impact to date.

Health innovation center leaders and participants will need to address some issues to be effective and deliver impact:

1. The last mile. All the systems engineering in the world won’t make a difference until we crack the code on how to change human behavior.

2. The rules. Most will have relatively limited impact until and unless the reimbursement rules substantially change. Rules drive ecosystems that create business models that deploy and scale innovation. Right now innovation centers are trying to use new tactics but can only deploy limited innovation strategies without a new playing field. They are living in the no man’s land between the now and the new.

3. Systems thinking overcoming silos. Healthcare is notoriously siloed at almost every level, from department to department to one sick care system to the next.

4. Patient willingness and ability to engage. The assumption is that more patient “engagement” will be mean better outcomes. That needs to be validated and we need to do a better job of targeted patient segments who want to take responsibility for their care and assume the consequences for the results.

5. Shifting value factors. Medical care is becoming commoditized. Patients can’t judge quality and cost since they are so opaque so they use service, speed, convenience and experience as proxies. There is relatively little correlation between satisfied patients and the quality of care they receive.

6. Data integration and interoperability. Resolving the protect but share dictum will be challenging.

7. Measuring and defining innovation. Big orbit change is necessary, not incrementalism. Innovation is  a measure of the multiple of user defined value that results when compared to the existing competitive offering.

8. Lead innovators, don’t manage innovation. We need leaderpreneurs and followers with an entrepreneurial mindset willing to fail at low cost.

9. Innovation management systems. There are many ways to foster, package, test, validate, prioritize and deploy components of an R/D portfolio. The process needs to efficient, effective and transparent to the users .

10. Execution. Inspiration and perspiration. In the end, no idea, invention, discovery, or process is worth much without a team who can execute or deploy it.

Sick care innovation centers might be a fad or an important tool for fixing what’s broken. We’ll have to see. In the meantime, enjoy yourself at all those conferences.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at www.sopenet.org