Pick Your Passion: There’s a Book on Innovation for Everyone
Carter and Bradford offer readers a variety of tools and best practices designed to help solve a range of problems. For example, the Attitude Influence guide helps users determine project supporters and detractors to help isolate and manage the key individuals who might impede a project’s success. The tool is “a subjective assessment that provides a visual political map to clarify the landscape around your team.”
The book also contains a listing of several tools that should be used together to provide innovation in areas such as: innovation using social communities, product definition, managing teams and metrics. Each tool was tested with managers from small startups to Fortune 500 companies, he says. Readers can pick and choose tools and information to match whatever projects they are working on.
Inspiring discussion
[[{"fid":"18077","view_mode":"140xauto","type":"media","attributes":{"height":213,"width":140,"style":"line-height: 1.538em; width: 140px; height: 213px; float: right; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;","alt":" - Patients Come Second by Paul Spiegelman","title":"Patients Come Second by Paul Spiegelman","class":"media-element file-140xauto"}}]]To attract readers, many authors must find a way to catch their eyes. Paul Spiegelman titled his book “Patients Come Second” with the goal of being provocative and creating discussion. “The industry has to be shaken up a little bit,” he says. The point, though, is that “to provide great patient care, we have to start with ourselves and create better teams and better cultures. Running a successful organization is really about leadership and consistency.”
Like many businesses, healthcare tends to focus on the financial, Speigelman says, but a focus on people and culture “will drive better patient satisfaction and financial results.” In the book, he discusses successful companies that have a emphasis on employee engagement, including Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods and The Container Store. “They have outperformed their competitors and what they have in common is a focus on employees.”
Taking a cultural IQ test can get organizations started, Spiegelman says, which is included in the book. The test helps organizations assess their culture and set a baseline. To plan for the future, “the first step is understanding where you are. Once you’ve done that, you can set the roadmap for improvement.” Living a set of core values everyday impacts the daily decision making of the organization’s leaders and “sets the foundation to grow a positive workplace culture.” He includes “commonsense and small” efforts regarding recognition, training and development and community services that all help in the effort.
Healthcare is always in a state of change, but maybe no time like the present, says Spiegelman. “So much is unknown. Everyone is looking for answers.” Those answers, he says, aren’t going to come from a CEO but from a collaborative effort that allows for testing of innovative solutions that may or may not work. “It comes down to empowering your team in a way that they feel listened to and feel they have the ability to bring their ideas forward and have those ideas implemented.
Designing optimal care
Another book ensures a look at healthcare from the perspective of all stakeholders. “Design For Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience” is based on research in the different sectors of healthcare, says author Peter Jones. Each chapter covers a different context for those involved in designing optimal care. “The purpose of the book is to help readers understand the whole scope of what’s available in healthcare design.”
Because healthcare is very fragmented and complex, Jones says, the various stakeholders don’t have a good view of the whole scope of activities, whether within a clinical setting, a patient’s lifecycle or a large institution. “We don’t understand very well how technologies are deployed across the whole organization,” he says.
The challenges of the healthcare industry, Jones says, make it difficult for organizations to plan for the long term. With thin profit margins and frequent policy changes, “just managing the organization in the short term is difficult enough. The emphasis on managing risk makes all but the best funded organization fairly risk averse to significant innovation of their practices.”
True innovation requires a lot more than just bringing in new technology, Jones adds. Technology should follow an organization’s innovation strategy but organizations need to determine what innovation means for them. “I like to say if technology is leading the way then you’re following somebody else’s innovation and it’s going to be old innovation. All medical technologies are seen as a substitute for organic innovation that clinics develop on their own. Rather than being pushed by policy, organizations need to get ahead of that and determine their position in the community, the types of patients they know are coming as the population ages and the complexity of patients that need multiple visits.”
These are just a few of the tomes available to those focused on healthcare innovation but with all the change wrought by healthcare reform, expect more.
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.