Innovation: Changing the Culture In Healthcare

Changing the Culture

Innovation and changing the culture of a healthcare organization can be a monumental challenge. Innovation can be defined as the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay. To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. Innovation involves deliberate application of information, imagination and initiative in deriving greater or different values from resources, and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products. Changing the culture and breaking down the silos of a healthcare organization is crucial to inviting in innovation.

Finding Innovation

Healthcare is under pressure! There are intense demands to improve performance across all spectrums of the business. Operating costs are continually rising just as the true the cost of their services are being aggressively challenged. Healthcare organizations are quickly turning to innovation as a way to survive these turbulent times. Organizations are using idea campaigns and idea games as methods to generate innovative processes. These two methods take the presumed level of innovative decision making out of the C-Suite or leadership levels and put it right in the lap of the front line staff. Idea campaigns are time-limited events focused on generating and selecting ideas for achieving incremental improvement in critical measures of performance. Idea games are events focused on generating, selecting, and funding ideas for achieving dramatic improvement.

Getting Desired Results

Seeking innovation and creative insights into change with these two methods are producing results for organizations. Both methods blend perfectly into the continuous quality improvement focus of Lean Six Sigma. They are clearly demonstrating how creative thinking and open communications can initiate change in a corporate culture that is typically highly resistant. When carefully planned and implemented, idea campaigns and idea games offer healthcare significant opportunity for engaging their entire organization.