Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1412801
68 INNOVATION 10 hospital innovation execs on how their role has evolved during the pandemic By Katie Adams W hen the pandemic began, hospitals realized digital inno- vation strategy was no longer a nice-to-have, but rather a must-have. Below, 10 innovation leaders from hospi- tals and health systems across the country shared how their role has evolved since the pandemic began. Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and style. omas Graham, MD. Chief Innovation and Transformation Of- ficer at Kettering (Ohio) Health: In my Becker's article, "Innovation in the time of coronavirus," I emphasized the critical role innovation would play in addressing the threats associated with the pandemic. I found myself defending the practice of putting ideas to work, despite the inherent challenges that have always been associated with inno- vation-at-scale. To address the inquiry at hand, I'll pick the two biggest "recalibra- tions" to my approach to how and why we innovate. e first is agility and velocity. Innovation has always been a nonlin- ear, long-to-success endeavor. Perhaps it's because it seemed like the unmet needs we were serving were either incremental advancements or "solving for tomorrow's problem." When the threat is so immedi- ate, you must shi your frame of reference, and resource allocation to direct as much he to solving big problems, for large populations faster and more economically. e power of partnerships, even with traditional competitors, was emphasized, especially for its ability to accelerate innovation. e second is innovation for caregivers. Our respective and collective calling is to heal the sick. Suddenly, we found that our innovation apparatus and bandwidth needed to be bifurcated to include pro- tecting our fellow caregivers. Just as many techniques and technol- ogies emerged around protocols and personal protective equipment to keep our doctors and nurses safe — and working to provide care through challenging times. While everything changed, really nothing changed. Innovation re- mains the mechanism to improve and extend human life, while cre- ating economic opportunities for the communities we serve. Inno- vation will always happen best — and fastest — at the intersection of knowledge domains where ideas come together and get fertilized. Sara Vaezy. Chief Digital Strategy and Business Development Offi- cer at Providence (Renton, Wash.): At the beginning of the pandem- ic, our focus was nearly entirely on managing the crisis in front of us. Innovation came in the form of leveraging and scaling the technology that we had in place to meet the new needs of our communities — in- cluding delivering care remotely and self-service information, screen- ing and triage — very rapidly. Part of this meant the velocity of deci- sion-making was greatly increased. Roles expanded to think about how to apply existing technology in new ways, at an unprecedented pace. Today — over a year and a half since the first COVID patient was treated in one of our hospitals — we're both continuing to respond while also thinking strategically about innovation in a vastly changed environment at new, breakneck velocity and intensity levels. e competitive landscape since COVID has evolved to include digital innovators and payer-providers that entered or accelerated their work with COVID. Much of our time and focus now is on business model evolution enabled or supported by digital innovation and adoption. Karen Murphy, PhD, RN. Chief Innovation Officer at Geisinger (Danville, Pa.): Innovation leaders were called upon during the pan- demic to lead fundamentally different approaches to problem-solv- ing. Health systems were required to build a new infrastructure to support COVID-19 testing, results reporting, remote monitoring and vaccine administration. e time frame for developing innovations went from months to hours, days and weeks. We were required to be nimble and focused. e innovation team worked on rapidly deploying digital technology to solve the most urgent needs. When we emerge from the pandemic, we will have several use cases to serve as examples of the "possible." Our work during the pandemic demonstrated that we can contribute to successful transformation of patient/consumer experience and care delivery while lowering total cost of care. Richard Zane, MD. Chief Innovation Officer at UCHealth (Auro- ra, Colo.): My role as a leader has certainly evolved as the pandemic has taken hold, and it became very obvious that the current way in which we cared for patients was not going to work without an inno- vative approach to care. Although tragic, no crisis is without oppor- tunity to accelerate change. As an innovation leader who is also a physician and clinical leader, the pandemic represented an opportunity to engage both patients and providers in fundamental cultural change that would have tak- en many years. As everyone knows, virtual health became a central theme in the pandemic, but just as importantly, the ability to have wide-scale and enthusiastic adoption of clinical decision support was embraced, as was deploying different forms of intelligence and tech- nology into clinical workflows. Omkar Kulkarni. Chief Innovation Officer at Children's Hospital Los Angeles: e pandemic has made innovation crucial in all as- pects of hospital operations. Given the dynamic nature of the pan- demic, innovation efforts and resources are oen targeted to solve pressing, time-sensitive problems that impact the immediate needs of the hospital and our patients and families. e output of these inno- vation activities are oen simple solutions that use existing technolo- gies and tools readily available for repurposing. Frugality and agility have been especially important tenets during the panic as risk tolerance is lower given the high stakes and tight time- lines. We have also found the need to partner and collaborate with others in our local ecosystem to achieve rapidly scalable wins. Jason Joseph. Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Infor- mation Officer at Spectrum Health (Grand Rapids, Mich.): We have seen innovation come into the mainstream. Oen we think of innovation as a small, tangential activity to find something purely novel, most likely with technology. With the pandemic, we have ac- celerated our need to find new ways of doing things and to deliver them quickly. We have brought new technology to bear at a record pace, and we have been able to adapt our operations in near real time.