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PERSPECTIVE
For healthcare leaders, rethinking how we deliver care isn’t just important—it’s urgent. It’s time to recognize that innovation for innovation’s sake—no matter how well intentioned —too often fails to improve patient experience and outcomes.
What’s missing? Input from our most crucial stakeholders: patients and the frontline providers who care for them.
Published November 11, 2024
Innovation has become a popular buzzword in healthcare, driven by the reality of the increasingly challenging environment. As margins tighten, reimbursements decline, workforce shortages persist, and the population ages, providers must stretch their dwindling resources to meet growing demand. Technologies like AI, virtual care, and remote patient monitoring have the potential to bridge this divide.
With so many tools available in this digital age, why do so many patients continue to fall through the cracks? A 2023 Harris poll of healthcare consumers found that 70% felt the system failed to meet their needs in at least one way. Costs and access topped the list of consumer concerns.
It’s clear that innovation alone is not enough to bridge the healthcare gap.
In most healthcare organizations, executives make strategic decisions, including investments in addressing care gaps. Although well-intentioned, these decisions often include technological innovations that ultimately fail to effectively improve care outcomes or costs. This begs the question: Why?
The mass migration to electronic health records (EHRs) in the 2010s is a cautionary tale of divorcing policy and innovation from clinical reality. EHRs have many benefits. Recent cyberattacks, which forced hospitals to revert to paper charting, underscore their value.
However, because the first EHRs were developed with limited clinician input and real-world testing, they were user experience nightmares. The rush to implement (driven by federal policies like Meaningful Use) created significant stress and administrative burden for physicians and nurses, ultimately decreasing productivity by as much as much as 20%-30%, and therefore increasing the cost of care.
We’re likely still feeling the fallout of the ill-conceived EHR revolution as many fed-up providers retired early or left medicine for nonclinical careers.
It’s easy to understand why our industry continues to innovate by executive decree. After all, without executive support, a project will never get off the ground. With that support frequently comes executive direction and project decisions. Top-down innovation is fast and efficient. Although well intentioned, these projects have an inherent flaw and are likely doomed to fail from the start due to lack of direct insight from front line providers and patients. These potentially failed projects aren’t just found within health systems, health tech companies are more prone as they innovate in even greater isolation.
As healthcare leaders and professionals, we want the best for our patients and colleagues. Achieving better outcomes for all stakeholders means taking a more intentional approach to innovation that addresses real-world needs to improve clinician productivity and patient experience. The best way to do this is to embed these stakeholders throughout the process.
Although this approach may raise concerns about slowing innovation, the reality is it more than likely will instead accelerate it due to more rapid adoption. Front line driven innovation can’t just be a talking point in an organization’s initiative. It must be a nurtured culture and philosophy established from the top by recruiting creative and collaborative thinkers, deliberate planning, process engineering, and strategic partnering. It’s the only way to ensure that today’s investments produce meaningful gains in access, experience, and quality of life for patients and caregivers.
Experienced leaders recognize the success of innovation is critically dependent on the right people and process. However, in healthcare the people factor is frequently underestimated, specifically when considering who to include. Clinical providers and patients are overlooked as the most important stakeholders.
Engaging patients and providers in the change process begins with culture and trust building. Leaders must communicate that healthcare is a long game that demands a purposeful approach through collaboration at all levels of the organization.
Inviting clinicians into our decision-making may feel time-consuming and overly complicated. We need to cultivate the belief (personally and as a leadership team) that our providers represent our closest connection to our patients and that, as such, they are our greatest innovation resource. Often, they already know the solutions to the problems that keep us up at night, resulting in patient dissatisfaction, so involving them almost always means better outcomes.
Simple actions leaders can take to foster a culture of engagement include:
The bottom line is that it’s time to rethink how we approach care innovation. Innovation shouldn’t simply be about the latest tool or system; it’s about creating a culture that engages our most essential stakeholders in the change process.
The future of healthcare depends on our ability to innovate beyond the norm, rethink traditional models of care, and lead with a vision that prioritizes the patient experience above all else. These transformations largely depend on the steps we take today to focus energy and resources on our most precious asset in our mission to improve lives – our providers.
TERMS OF USE WEBSITE PRIVACY POLICY
CCPA PRIVACY POLICY DO NOT SELL OR SHARE MY PERSONAL INFORMATIONBILLING DISCLOSURESITE MAP
COPYRIGHT © CEP AMERICA, LLC, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.