Saturday, May 21, 2011

What are good books for Innovation and Healthcare?

I would love any suggestions if you have one you would like to share :)
But I will share with you a few over I like with the next few blog post that I have read recently and why I like them.

First on my list is The Open Innovation Marketplace written by Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin.

First, this book is amazing in the describing what open innovation is.  Alph Bingham is a co-founder of InnoCentive and is said to be a pioneer in the field of open innovation. 
The question I know you are asking is how can the information be used to reform healthcare?  If we look at rising healthcare cost, we know that we need a change and we need one quickly.  In order to do this we have to come up with solutions to the problems we are facing, especially for hospitals.
Hospitals already have a small profit margin (if they are lucky, around 2%) and if the healthcare cost continue to rise at a staggering rate, then many hospitals will soon be out of business.
In order to change this, they have to use disruptive innovation in order to combat the rising cost and to come up with a patient-centered healthcare that speaks between systems and engages patients, physicians,and hospitals.  But Innovation and new ways of doing things better is not made public and shared easily.  This is due to fear that they may loose their competitive advantage if they share ideas on how to do things better.
In The Open Innovation Marketplace, Bingham talks about risk portfolio management and open innovation and refers to it similar to managing a stock portfolio.
In the book he stated "One important component of open innovation is that it creates an opportunity to share risks and expenses with external parties....error minimization, portfolio management, and open innovation need to be integrated into a total innovation management system that copes effectively with risk and probability, and that manages to a desirable economic outcome
When hospitals need to change or have the consequences of failing, they need to change with an innovative model that has a team that manages their business and innovation.  This team can use what Bingham refers to as the Long tail (using the people that are not in your organization but have the knowledge to solve your problem) and gain the insight from the untapped knowledge in the world that far surpasses the current organizations knowledge base.  To help come up with solutions and/or new processes for hospitals, they can use companies like InnoCentive to post their problem and use the "long tail" to come up with the solution quickly and efficiently (You know if NASA is using InnoCentive to help solve their problems, so can hospitals).  When hospitals get their solutions, the innovation center can assess the who would be the best person and/or team to implement these processes. Now instead of taking months or years and trial and error, hospitals will have a solution to their problem in months.
Bingham and Spradlin also talk a lot about culture change.  If you work in a hospital that is not yet making changes to prepare for the future of healthcare, then the last half of the book will be very useful.  This is the section that is the "playbook" of the open innovation model or as they call it the playbook for the CDE (Challenge Driven Enterprise).  This gives organizations information how to change from a closed system to an open one and deal with the culture at the same time.  As pointed out in the book, "culture eats strategy for lunch."  If you need to make changes in your organization then The Open Innovation Marketplace, helps you deal with culture so it does not eat your strategy for lunch.

I know it sounds easy enough...using a company like InnoCentive to help come up with solutions to the problems hospitals are facing, but you have to know how to integrate that with your organization.  That is why The Open Innovation Marketplace is #1 on my list for a must read for CEOs, COOs and managers in healthcare

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