Driving Innovations in Health Service Delivery: Key Concepts

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Driving Innovations in Health Service Delivery
Key Concepts

• Paul Plsek
• Consultant in Innovation and Complex
  SystemsDirectedCreativity.com
• Atlanta, GA
• Presented at AHRQ Annual ConferenceSeptember 27,
  2007

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Why Focus on Innovation?

• Key to long-term success in other industries
• Good innovation processes exist in medical,
  surgical, pharmaceutical, diagnostic, device and
  computer technology, but
• we routinely take 21st century technology and
  embed it in service delivery processes that are
  often conceptually rooted in the 1970s

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What Do We MeanBy Innovation?

• Key themes from the literature
• Novel idea
• Context dependent
• Successful translation to reality (i.e., creates
  real and substantial value in some sense)
• For example
• Innovation refers to the implementation of new
  or altered products, services, processes,
  systems, organizational structures, or business
  models as a means of improving one or more
  domains of health care quality. (From the AHRQ
  Innovation Exchange website)

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Some Principles of Innovation

• Organizational culture matters
• Need to challenge current ways of thinking, tacit
  rules and assumptions
• Practice of attention, escape and movement
• Cycles of divergent convergent thinking
• Gradual application of judgment
• stage-gate or innovation-funnel concept

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Typical Process for Innovation
IdeaGeneration
Selection Development
Testing Evaluation
Preparation
Sustain Spread
Implementation
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What are the key dimensions of a organizational
culture of innovation?

• Risk taking
• Resources
• Widely shared information
• Specific targets
• Tools and techniques
• Rewards systems
• Relationships