Becker's Hospital Review

31 INNOVATION The qualities of a strong innovation program: 2 healthcare leaders weigh in By Mackenzie Bean E very healthcare organization aims to provide a creative and col- laborative working environment that welcomes opportunities to rethink workflows, tools and more. Corporate innovation pro- grams have increasingly emerged as a key vehicle to drive these efforts in healthcare. Two healthcare leaders discussed why innovation is so important and shared the characteristics of a strong innovation team during a Nov. 11 panel at Becker's CEO + CFO Virtual Event. Healthcare executives on the panel were: • Rick Shumway, president and CEO of Stanford Health Care – Valley- Care in Livermore, Calif. • Susan Turney, MD, CEO of Marshfield (Wis.) Clinic Health System Here is an excerpt from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity. Question: What are the characteristics of a strong innova- tion program? Rick Shumway: e first is you have to have a culture of psychological safety. People need to feel like they can step out on a ledge and step out on a limb in thinking differently about how we do things or have done things. If people are afraid of what might happen if they try something and it doesn't work, they'll stop trying, and they'll stop talking, and then the reality is, your innovation program, as well-structured and well-meaning as it might be, really stalls and doesn't work in the way that it needs to. e No. 2 thing is not just the ability to fail, but the ability to learn aer that failure and to learn very quickly. Obviously, failure is the antithe- sis of what we try and become as healthcare organizations. e stakes are very high, so failure is something that's scary to people for good reason. But we have to make sure that it's OK for people to get com- fortable with that concept and then to pick up the pieces very quickly and rearticulate. So making sure you have systems in place to quickly assimilate failure information and then make changes subsequently as a result is important. Dr. Susan Turney: I would agree. I think one of the things you men- tioned is that although you need to have leadership that is directly dedicated to innovation efforts, that is not where innovation will likely happen. It really happens from the people who are doing the work on the ground and coming up with great ideas, so that really needs to be baked into an organization's culture. I write a weekly communication to all of our staff, and one of our messages consistently is, "Ask ques- tions, make suggestions, tell us how to improve," and it doesn't matter what you do in the organization to bring ideas forward, it matters that you take the time to share, because good ideas have come from across our enterprise from some of the least likely places. For us, the other piece is that being a fully integrated model of care — where we have our care providers, acute care facilities, research, education and a health plan under one roof — has really allowed us to innovate in ways that we can't in partnership with other commercial payers. We just don't have the volume of patients with some of our commercial payers to make it worthwhile for them to change their processes and procedures. It's not that large national insurers aren't willing to listen and even, frankly, understand the value, but when you have a small patient population, they're just not going to see the tangible savings that they would like to realize to put an entirely new system together. So again, having our own health plan has allowed us to be nimble, flexible and really experiment with new, lower-cost delivery methods that are going to be critical as we go forward in the new paradigm. n Intermountain expands digital care offerings: 4 things to know By Jackie Drees I ntermountain Healthcare is growing its partnership with Omada Health by making the digital health company's diabetes prevention program available as a covered benefit to the Salt Lake City-based system's medical group patients. Four things to know: 1. Intermountain and Omada teamed up in 2016 to launch an innovation collaboration with the American Medical Association focused on delivering digital dia- betes prevention services via physician referral. 2. The health system made Omada's program available as a covered benefit for its employees and adult depen- dents in 2019. 3. The expansion, annnounced in November, will allow patients with prediabetes seen by Intermountain Med- ical Group providers across its primary care facilities to use Omada's prevention program as a covered benefit. 4. Omada offers digital health programs to support pa- tients with Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and behavioral health issues. "Intermountain is focused on ensuring all patients re- ceive the care and information they need — where, when and how they want it — with seamless coordination across the system," said Elizabeth Joy, MD, director of Intermountain's health promotion and wellness office. "We've enrolled nearly 2,000 participants to date from our caregiver population, and we anticipate that access to the Omada program will enhance patient engage- ment and improve health outcomes in a time when pa- tients are seeking deeply human digital care." n

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