Creating Solutions through Open & Closed Innovation

Hospital's and health care in general are a prime industry for using open and closed innovation models when they are looking at becoming ACOs, implementing medical home models, and increasing patient activation.  With the flood of the online health care communities that are saturated with different ACO/medical home models, hospitals are left figuring out a model on their own which cost a lot of money and takes a lot of man hours.  If a hospital does decide to use what is out there already, it becomes hard to distinguish between the good and bad or just what would work for your particular organization.  The hospitals that will struggle the most will be the ones that are not integrated and do not have the man power to build and test a model.  When the race becomes close as your competitors are all racing toward the finish line; open/closed innovation can be the key.


If you do not want to risk your competitors getting your ideation/problems/questions to solve, then using a closed innovation model may be the answer.  When you can break the problem down in such a way that your competitors will not be able to figure out what you are doing then 100%, use open innovation.  This can decrease the time to market by accessing the crowd or the "long tail."  The faster the flow of information the closer you are to the customer with fewer gaps and less need to forecast.  This may provide some ideas that you may not get from a closed innovation model (or no innovation model at all).

If a hospital can figure out how to use both closed and open innovation successfully, then they can use this to their advantage by becoming consultants for other health care systems.  Hospital systems can use this to improve quality and outcomes when their medial home models are implemented (which means if you have improved outcomes you have improved bargaining power with insurance companies).  They can take a new approach to solving problems/creating solutions that other hospital systems are not.  This will set them apart from their competitors, while aligning your hospital with forward thinkers.

When deciding to use innovation, use different channels for decision-making.  Use internal existing resources for decisions that you don't want your competitor to get wind of.  Use crowd-sourcing when you want to access a large number of people to solve a problem.  Use University contracts when IP may be a concern.  Consulting can be another channel when you want to keep innovation internal but need expertise that is not available in your current organization.  Lastly, use joint ventures in a non-competing industry where both industries can benefit from the innovation.

The point is, that we have to be thinking of different ways to solve problems and creating better health care models.  We need to do it faster and cheaper.  The best most effective way to do this is to access the long tail and use the power of the masses to help us solve our problems and create business models that will be more than we could have ever imagined on our own.....its like having a global brainstorming session. :)
--The Catalyst