Innovation Expectations

Deploying innovations requires practitioners to elicit and document the expectations and goals of audiences in a disciplined and results-oriented manner. Exceeding the end users’ expectations is a major goal for healthcare innovators, but many innovation projects fail because a systems requirements approach is used instead of an intended results approach. The IL CoP’s Innovation Expectations subject area focuses on the key factors that can help innovators lead stakeholders to identify and document patients’ and other stakeholders’ expectations rather than try to guess their needs.

IL CoP’s Innovation Expectations collaboration features drive collective critical inquiry on different goal-setting frameworks like Objectives and Key Results (OKR). Systematic, framework-based, content enables innovation practitioners to keep a track of all expectations objectively and stay on top of them throughout the innovation process.

Innovation Discovery

Once innovation expectations are reasonably documented and established the IL CoP helps discover the solutions and techniques available to meet those expectations. Medigy’s IL CoP topics and subtopics navigation, organic content creation, offerings listings, and automatic references all serve to drive innovation discovery.

Innovation Intelligence and Evaluation

Healthcare innovations are evaluated by their intended use and the extent to which that objective is achieved. In this section, we help you assess your innovation efforts through quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Here you’ll find innovation evaluation content to help you arrive at the best choice for your unique circumstances. The articles in this section will also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the available innovation evaluation tools. ¹

Innovation Pilots and Early Adoption

95% of innovations in the healthcare space fail to achieve the desired level of customer adoption. This section focuses on bringing this figure down by understanding the challenges, problems, and mistakes that work against customer adoption. Here you’ll get actionable steps for achieving progress towards measurable KPIs that drive scalable deployments. We will help you increase your innovations’ adoption rates, leading to a quicker and more effective adoption process.

Innovation Decision Support

When innovation evaluations are underway using different metrics and frameworks, decision support tools are then utilized to help decide whether to procure and scale the innovation. This section discusses the various tools and technologies that will help you with thorough evaluations to make the best decisions.

Innovation Procurement

An efficient innovation procurement process is as important as deciding what to buy. The objective of this section is to help you get the best deal in the minimum possible time.

The complex process of procuring a technology, especially in a large organization, can quickly get too complicated. To keep you a step ahead, we share the industry’s best procurement practices along with the most common mistakes and problems. This practical knowledge will equip you to go out and snag the most lucrative deal there is.

Innovation Diffusion, Adoption, and Implementation

This section focuses on the three core processes of any innovation diffusion:

i) Presentation of the innovation to your organization

ii) Acceptance by the decision-makers

iii) Integration of the innovation into the existing culture

Various aspects of diffusion that innovators frequently overlook are discussed here to overcome such issues. ²

The posts found in this section will enhance your understanding of innovation diffusion. As a result, you’ll be able to achieve structured and accelerated diffusion in your healthcare organization.

Innovation Insights and Recognition

This section is all about recognition and awards in the healthcare industry. It highlights the achievements of people from across the globe who are responsible for their innovative healthcare practices. Here we celebrate their successes, show the hard work behind the scenes, and learn from their wins.

Innovation Termination

This section is your place to learn from others’ mistakes. Here we feature content that revolves around the phasing out of healthcare innovations. You’ll find case studies from past healthcare innovation projects that fell through. The learning points you’ll pick from here will enhance the chances of your success and keep you safe from the survivorship bias.

Here are the two specific points that this section consists of:

(a) Failure of innovation at diffusion stage – How an oversight by a health facility can lead to failure of widespread adoption and how to avoid such mistakes.

(b) Difference between Failure, Exit, Retirement of technologies.³ – We will talk about all the concepts related to phasing out of innovations and what each one exactly means. You’ll get to know the difference between concepts like Innovation, Novation, Replacement, Failure, Exit, and Retirement of healthcare innovations. With this knowledge, you’ll know what exactly to do with your innovation once its time is up.

Innovation Careers

This section is known as the Career Mentor of healthcare innovation professionals. Here we share informative content that dispels common myths around the topic of innovation lifecycle careers and also explain evolving roles and responsibilities of CIOs at hospitals. We also provide specialized career guidance and the latest trends – with a laser-sharp focus on the healthcare innovation context.

Whether you’re an innovation leader or a job seeker, bookmark this section as your go-to place for career guidance.

Innovation Connectors

When an innovation is widely applicable across multiple sectors, we often call it a horizontal solution, while an innovation that mainly works within a single industry, like healthcare, is called a vertical solution. Zoom Technologies’ webinar used as a medium for telehealth during the COVID-19 Pandemic is an excellent example – with no change to a horizontal solution, it solved many healthcare vertical problems.

The Innovation Connectors subject area caters to unmodified horizontal solutions that can be applicable, helpful, and potentially even more disruptive than healthcare-specific vertical solutions. The unobvious ‘Innovation Connectors’ have a potential to significantly disrupt healthcare ecosystem and the way certain healthcare practices are conducted. This section focuses on various how-to-guides for innovation practitioners to see unobvious “connections” and “cross-pollination” opportunities outside of healthcare that help discover relevant horizontal innovations to address healthcare vertical problems. Cross-pollination creates a collision space⁴ which will lead to unexpected innovation to solve healthcare problems.

The section discusses those innovations that:

• Already exist in the market and are being sold horizontally for many industries or vertically for another industry and are commercially available and not in R&D phase.

• Do not need alteration (or need minimal change) for the healthcare industry.

• Promise to achieve significant goals or meet/exceed major expectations of something important in healthcare, unlike any other trivial or minor application of the horizontal solution in healthcare sector.

Return on Innovation

No business invests a single penny without knowing the returns, and healthcare innovation is no exception.

This section is dedicated to understanding the value of what value the innovation is returning to the business and users of that innovation – the financial value of healthcare innovations is a good starting point but it’s not the only focus. We begin by answering questions like: “Is this innovation financially viable?”, “What is the ROI on this one?”, “How long will it take to break even?”, etc.

AMA’s Return on Health⁵ is a good framework to consider. Good content in this section will allow innovation professional and decision-makers to use a language that is often more defensible, even in healthcare – the language of profits and returns.⁶

Innovation Leadership

In a care setting, it is often seen that innovations are quickly diffused and adopted in specific units, but a widespread adoption has always been a challenge. It thus becomes imperative to select a leadership style⁷ that supports innovation. An article from the SAGE journal⁸ discusses about ‘Distributed leadership’ and the ‘Hierarchical leadership’ style. For a successful adoption of innovation, it is the former than the latter that is essential. When it comes to health innovation implementation there are three major players⁹, ‘Specialist Practitioners/Consultants’, ‘Allied Care Staff’ and the ‘Managerial’ teams. If a group lacks experience and needs guidance the ‘Hierarchical’ structure works, but when it comes healthcare, it’s more about expertise and knowledge that matters and hence practitioners tend to be the most influential leaders in this case. It is thus important in healthcare to adopt a ‘Shared’ or ‘Distributed’ style of leadership. The Shared leadership involves interactions among all levels of leaders (doctors, nurses, managers etc.) that have a role to play in influencing the diffusion and adoption of an innovation at the facility to ultimately get their jobs done. In ‘Hierarchical leadership’, managers are often given an outsized role than practitioners and other stakeholders. This is not bad and this is how it is represented as per Charlie Munger’s ‘Authority- Misinfluence Tendency’¹⁰. There are cases in the top-down approach, people blindly follow their leader’s vision and may turn up successful. To the flip side if the leadership is poor, with a weak mission and mission and if a leader makes blunders in communicating it to their people, things may end up worse off.

This section will discuss: 1. Case studies of failed innovation adoption¹¹ in a care setting solely because of their misguided leadership styles. 2. Common misconceptions in the Distributed and Hierarchical leadership¹² concepts and how these can be corrected to foster the correct strategy for innovation adoption. 3. How- to-guides to help HDOs chart out strategies for their innovation leadership team to effectively come up with the relevant vision, mission and roadmap for innovation diffusion and adoption to support the staff in patient care.

Innovation Evidence Trustworthiness

Systematic approach to evaluating the trustworthiness of any innovation is key to achieving the goals in relation to patient care and satisfaction. Innovation practitioners at HDOs face persistent issues in accumulating the required knowledge around innovation evaluation. The absence of an evaluation framework can lead to implementation of technologies that make fraudulent claims. This can increase the likelihood of risks and adverse patient outcomes that can be fatal. An evidence-based, peer-reviews-driven approach could be one such framework to evaluate the trustworthiness of innovations to drive the diffusion without jeopardizing the overall outcome. Significant research questions to evaluate the credibility of any innovation, will help to make a distinction between fraudulent and genuine ones based on whether (a) The research went through a peer-review approval (b) Lacks evidence and provides biased opinions OR (c) Whether the research just considered correlation and lacks causal explanation¹³.

This section will focus on:

1. Understanding of fraudulent health research and fake evidence in the innovation lifecycle.

2. How-to-guides on methodologies to identify such fraudulent claims through mathematical and other techniques such as the Benford’s law¹⁴.

3. Case studies of implementation of fraudulent innovations that led to fatal outcomes and the lessons learnt thereby.

4. Strategic¹⁵ insights into fighting fake claims in adherence to the healthcare laws and regulations.

Innovation Behavioral Science

Stakeholders across the healthcare continuum often believe in technology driven innovations to achieve patient engagement objectives. Whilst this is partly true, and that technology forms just one part of the innovation adoption equation, the truth is that the aspect of psychology is widely ignored. Both patients cared for and the frontline decision makers at HDOs are neglected when it comes to evaluation of innovations. This negligence leads to failure in innovation adoption and is a result of ignoring the behavioral science aspect. Reconciliation of psychological tendencies along with the attention to detail to the technological framework, can increase the success rate of adoption for any innovation. From a behavioral science standpoint, trying to influence frontline decision makers into adopting a technology requires tapping into their needs and understanding challenges from their perspective. To make adoption of any innovation successful it involves guidance by evidence driven behavioral science strategies and user centered principles¹⁶.

This section will focus on:

1. Common mistakes that happen at adoption stage due to negligence of psychological tendencies of the stakeholders.
2. How-to-guides on how behavioral science is instrumental to building the right solutions to enhance patient experience.
3. Actionable insights into initiating behavioral nudges to improve patient experience and encourage adoption at a large scale.
4. Guidance to breaking barriers to innovation diffusion using psychology-based hacks.

Innovation Ethics

This section will focus on responsible innovation¹⁷ and why a socially ethical innovation matters most when it comes to patient care. This topic should talk about what innovation practitioners at HDOs could do to ensure implementing innovations with societal and ethical values by involving the concerned stakeholders from a very early stage. Medigy’s ILCoP helps the Innovation practitioners to gain deep and actionable insights of each step involved before adopting innovation for the desired objective. Whilst we educate the stakeholders on the Innovation Lifecycle, it is equally imperative to generate awareness about ensuring adoption of a framework that identifies ethically correct innovations that consider effects and potential impacts on patient care and the broader societal values. For instance, AMA¹⁸ provides a comprehensive guideline to practitioners to implement ethical innovations in accord with professional responsibilities to advance medical knowledge, improve quality of care, and promote the well-being of individual patients and the larger community. If at all, even by ignorance any innovation is implemented that could propagate ethical issues, the Hippocratic Oath might lose its relevance. If Innovation Ethics are not implemented the focus may turn away from patient care and safety to individual interest.

This section will focus on:

1. Responsible Innovation and its emerging importance to Innovation Practitioners.
2. Actionable insights into initiating a framework that lays out the considerations for implementing ethical innovations at HDOs.
3. Misconceptions between Innovation Trustworthiness and Innovation Ethics.
4. Mistakes while discovering and evaluating innovations that do not fall into the ethical code¹⁹ of conduct and may turn up fatal to patient safety.
5. How-to-guide on promoting responsible innovations.
6. Case studies²⁰ of implementing ethical dimensions into the healthcare innovation community.
7. Myths and misconceptions on the ethical and legal challenges post innovation adoption.

References