Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1311112
29 INNOVATION 3 things that kill creativity on innovation teams: Lifespan leader weighs in By Mackenzie Bean I nnovation must be a collaborative, bound- ary-pushing process supported by a team that is diverse in every sense of the word, according to Megan Ranney, MD, director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health, a partnership between Providence, R.I.-based Lifespan and Brown University. Among other topics at the Becker's HIT + Revenue Cycle Virtual Event, Dr. Ranney dis- cussed the most important characteristics of a strong innovation team and what kills cre- ativity among these team members. Below is an excerpt from the conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. Question: What does innovation re- ally mean in healthcare? How do you define it at your organization? Dr. Megan Ranney: I think innovation is one of those almost overused words right now. Ev- erybody says that everything is innovative, and it's actually part of the reason we didn't put it in the title for our Center for Digital Health. We think about innovation as occurring when you facilitate collisions of ideas, hopes and frustra- tions among a wide cross section of people. So the idea of innovation is that you take ideas or possibilities from disparate segments of soci- ety, bring them together and create novel solu- tions, things that would not have existed, were those ideas or frustrations existing in isolation. Innovation should be something that is collab- orative, that really pushes the boundaries and also that hopefully works, although we're big subscribers to the idea that you can also fail fast and that sometimes it's through failure that you create the most impactful ideas. Q: What are the qualities or charac- teristics of a strong innovation team? MR: A strong innovation team should have multiple diverse perspectives, and I mean di- verse in every sense of the word. It goes with- out saying that you should have the diversity of race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and background. at's kind of the sine qua non of a great innovation team, but you should also have diversity in professional perspectives. So for instance, at the Center for Digital Health we have not just physicians and psychologists, but anthropologists, engineers, computer sci- entists and people from for-profit business. We have patients, community health advocates and folks from nonprofits. You also want a diversity of age. You want some folks that are further along in their career or in their years and high schoolers or kids in college to help contribute. It's through that wide variety of life experiences, perspectives and professional and personal outlooks that you can create those collisions of ideas that can transform the way that we imagine or deliver healthcare and help to promote health. Q: What kills creative thinking within an innovation team? MR: e need to demonstrate a certain type of return on investment in too short of a time frame is going to be one of the first things that shuts down creativity, because if you know that you have to balance your budget at the end of year one, there's no way you're going to be able to take those creative risks that may lead to the greatest developments. e second thing is lack of interdisciplinary expertise, or again going back to my earlier answer, that lack of diversity in experience and perspectives abso- lutely shuts down creativity. We are all most successful when we are in that mishmash of ideas and energy. If you create a team that's just filled with the same people and label it innova- tion, you're not going to get creativity out of it. Innovation does not occur in a vacuum; it oc- curs because it has a bedrock of great science or great operational expertise or great com- munity partnerships that have set the stage for innovation to happen. So the third thing that I think can really kill creativity is to ex- pect people to go off and be creative without them having that underlying foundation of preexisting good science or business exper- tise or work-community partnerships. You really can only build great things if you have some sort of a starting point that's based in reality to go from. n Intermountain announces 2 digital health partnerships By Laura Dyrda S alt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare an- nounced two digital health partnerships in October. On Oct. 6, the health system launched its partnership with Notable Health, a platform that automates the pa- tient intake process. Notable's platform provides digital check-ins through mobile registration and virtual clinical intake for in-person and telehealth visits, which decreases check-in time. The health system initially deployed the technology for more than 100 providers and now plans to scale the plat- form organizationwide. Intermountain said it has 94 per- cent patient satisfaction rating for digital check-in and reg- istration. Notable extended capabilities of Intermountain's health app to include digital assistants that automate ad- ministrative workflows and simplify follow-ups. Notable's platform integrates with Intermountain's legacy EHR and uses artificial intelligence-enabled assistants to automate clinical documentation creation. Charting time is down by 30 minutes per day due to the technology, ac- cording to the health system's press release. On Oct. 7, the 24-hospital health system announced a part- nership with Vynca, which provides advanced care planning solutions. Intermountain will use the technology to digitize workflows and centralize information about patients' end-of- life preferences. The technology is designed with built-in error prevention and can help healthcare providers honor end-of- life wishes as well as reduce unwanted healthcare utilization. Intermountain integrated Vynca's solution into its Cerner EHR and receives business intelligence and reporting in- formation on when and where advanced care forms were accessed ahead of clinical decisions. n