HCA 827 TOPIC 4 Health care innovation and change
HCA 827 TOPIC 4 Health care innovation and change
HCA 827 TOPIC 4 Health care innovation and change
Health care innovation and change, while seemingly slow, often move faster than people in health care organizations are reasonably and pragmatically willing and able to adjust. What are two people-related barriers that health care leaders need to mitigate in order to facilitate innovation and change? How can those barriers best be mitigated? Why?
Innovation can be defined as invention + adoption + diffusion. In healthcare, it may be a novel idea, product, service or care pathway that has clear benefits when compared to what is currently done. Successful innovations often possess two key qualities: they are both usable and desirable.
Historically, the NHS and our academic partners have led the world in inventing and testing potential innovations. However, challenges remain. How can proven innovations be quickly and effectively adopted as best practice and taken up across the whole healthcare system? How can the commercial success of our ideas be realised at home rather than abroad, as has too often been the case? The situation has to change if we want our patients to receive the first-hand benefits of innovation.
Healthcare is not unique in slow adoption and diffusion. It took the telephone 64 years, electricity 45 years, computers 23 years, mobile phones 16 years, radio 12 years and the internet 13 years to achieve 40% consumer adoption.1 But other sectors have made progress in innovating better, faster and smarter than in healthcare. Successful companies ask their customers what they want and
HCA 827 TOPIC 4 Discussion Question One
innovate based on their findings. They identify the key pain points and work with customers, other stakeholders and experts to solve the issue, develop the strategy for adoption and diffusion, and then deliver it. Such organisations have developed and provided a culture of innovation for their employees.
The challenge of innovating in healthcare
The NHS faces a number of key issues that need to be addressed if we are to successfully innovate:
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budgets are limited – the NHS has to make efficiency savings to close the estimated £22 billion funding gap between patients’ needs and resources2
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demand is increasing – our population is living longer than ever before, often with multiple comorbidities
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the front line is under increasing pressure – as clinical demands increase, new ways of doing things are often the first casualty
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public expectations are rising
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accepting failure as part of the innovation process – there is no penalty for following custom and practice, but if you try and make an innovative change and it fails, the repercussions for the clinician or the trust/clinical commissioning group board can be considerable.
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