Becker's Hospital Review

35 INNOVATION Hartford HealthCare's Dr. Barry Stein: Innovation isn't an option for hospitals — 'It's an imperative' By Andrea Park A t Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare, a robust innovation strategy is led by Barry Stein, MD, vice president and chief clinical innovation officer, and based on five core pillars. ose pillars, which guide every innovation initiative at the health sys- tem, comprise a robust innovation ecosystem, a wide portfolio of inno- vation activities, a comprehensive governance process, open communi- cation channels, and innovation integration and continuous learning. "e overarching things are the leadership and the relational piece — understanding how important innovation is and how to integrate innovation into an operating model," said Dr. Stein, an interventional radiologist. "You have to have a disciplined approach about it. In every lecture and every presentation, we put up these five pillars and then we explain how what we're doing that day fits into at least one pillar, so everybody feels like they're building the money jar, so to speak." Here, Dr. Stein explains not what innovation looks like at Hartford HealthCare, but how it feels, and weighs in on the benefits of having practicing clinicians lead the charge in healthcare innovation. Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity. Question: What does innovation look like at Hartford HealthCare? What are the core goals and priorities that tie everything together? Dr. Barry Stein: I would love to reframe that question as, "What does innovation feel like at Hartford Healthcare?" because I'm not sure that you can spot it anywhere, but you can feel it everywhere. at's my philosophy about innovation in a big and complex healthcare system: for everybody to feel like they're working in an organization where innovation is as high a priority as any of the operating performance goals and vision, where innovation is vital to the future transformation of healthcare. Without innovation, we will not be able to transform healthcare, so that's sort of the overlying mantra. In terms of why we do innovation at Hartford HealthCare, it isn't an option anymore. For us to be able to differentiate ourselves and provide the care that our consumers are looking for, it's an imperative. We think about innovation at Hartford HealthCare as a simple equation: taking new ideas and translating those ideas to impact. One of the biggest failures in healthcare over the last decade was not a lack of great ideas, but a real inability for healthcare systems to translate these extraordinary ideas to impact. With that being said, we look at innovation as something in which we have to, first, curate and attract the best ideas, and then we have to have an environment that is really conducive to translating in a very efficient way those ideas to impact. How are we going about doing that? ere are so many different competing priorities, but the North Star for our organization over the next five years is captured with "#123" — that is, to be No. 1 for consumer experience in the Northeast by 2023. It's a tall order, but that's our goal for the next five years, and almost everything in our organization, including resources and strategies, is driving toward that goal. From an innovation standpoint, when we talk about which ideas we're going to translate into impact, we're only focusing on the ideas that drive toward that North Star, #123. I think that's a really important thing, be- cause in a lot of organizations, innovation is just the shiniest object or the greatest idea of the moment, but it has no relevance to the overall goals and strategies of the organization. at's why most organizations fail to embed innovation, because it feels like it's happening on the side, for other reasons, done by other people. To embed that feel of innova- tion in the organization, everybody doing the work every day should be feeling that, No. 1, their ideas count, and No. 2, we have the culture and the infrastructure to translate those ideas that we believe will have the biggest impact. ose are the goals of innovation: to drive and align with our strategic priorities, and to create a differentiated value proposi- tion and competitive advantage in the marketplace. Also underpinning this is the philosophy that we are creating an effi- cient and relatively frictionless healthcare innovation ecosystem and platform to accelerate these ideas so that all stakeholders are able to extract value. But you asked a question that keeps coming back in my head: "What does it look like?" Let me try and put it into words. e work we're doing and the intentional strategy is around moving innovation from an "initiative" to embedding cultural competency with tangible im- provements to the core operating model and beyond. Q: So, it's not just a list of smaller projects strung togeth- er, but a big, overall mindset change? BS: Yes, and another way I like to describe it is that it's also converting extraordinary human capital — meaning folks that are really good at what they're doing — and transforming that into social capital, where people are far more connected in ways that they hadn't been connected before, across multiple different disciplines and legacy silos, in what I like to call an adaptive space where the magic happens. So, it's really about taking all those extraordinary folks and creating an environment where they're now connected, as opposed to not con- nected. We're translating human capital into social capital, with "so- cial" meaning "connected beings transferring information." For us to do anything and apply resources around innovation, it has to solve a relevant problem at Hartford HealthCare. Any solution com- ing in is going to solve a real, significant problem at our organization. Anybody coming in has to be able to articulate what their problem statement is, what the gap is that they're hoping to close. at gap has to be impactful for us, so that everybody on the ground understands why we're doing it, feels like it's important and understands how it's going to drive toward the bigger goals. My goal is to enroll everybody in the process. Q: How do you go about doing that? BS: e way we look at this is, ordinarily most organizations — and certainly in healthcare — are incredible performance engines, operating engines. We have metrics that drive us to the next level: at's the performance engine. And then we've got to think about how you start to include entrepreneurial innovation as part of that. ey're almost the antithesis of one another. e operating engine represents predictability, and the innovation is unpredictability, an intentional departure. Bridging that gap has been really key. One of the strategies that we've used and that has been very successful is to express our strategy very much like other business units do in the

• Cover