What is Innovation????
- Nina Arboine
- Nov 28, 2020
- 2 min read
What is innovation and how does this affect our future in healthcare?
First and foremost, I would like to start off this blog by showing a Ted talk discussing how nurses can help drive innovation in the healthcare sector.
The definition of innovation can vary, but most emphasize new approaches or products that result in meaningful improvements; these can include the generation, development or implementation of new or better ideas that produce policies, products, strategies, services, procedures, models or other solutions that add value over the status quo (Omachonu & Einspruch, 2010). Omachonu & Einspruch (2010) acknowledges while all improvements must be considered desirable and beneficial to be deemed “innovative”, presumably when policy makers speak of innovation in healthcare - especially when they speak about applying sizeable financial resources to bring about those improvements - the change they are seeking is substantive change, meaningful change, and transformation change. But this goal may need to be made more explicit in they way we define innovation and what specifically the needs that are being addressed.
As discussed in Omachonu & Einspruch (2010) article, they elaborate on further defining innovation into four main types:
1) Product innovation: “introduction of a good or service that is new or significantly
improved with respect to its characteristics or intended uses. This includes significant
improvements in technical specifications, components and materials, incorporated software, user friendliness or other functional characteristics.”
2) Process innovation: “implementation of a new or significantly improved production or
delivery method. This includes significant changes in techniques, equipment and/or software.The customer does not usually pay directly for process, but the process is required to deliver aproduct or service and to manage the relationship with the various stakeholders.”
3) Marketing innovation: “implementation of a new marketing method involving significant
changes in product design or packaging, product placement, product promotion or pricing.”
4) Organizational innovation: “implementation of a new organizational method in the firm’s business practices, workplace organization or external relations.”
As Figure 1 shows from Omachonu & Einspruch, (2010) discussion, healthcare organizations have six explicit functions: treatment, diagnosis, prevention, education, research and outreach. This requires a purpose, and healthcare organizations are compelled to effective management of quality, cost, safety, efficiency and outcomes. The core of healthcare innovation is the needs of patients and the healthcare professionals/practitioners and providers who deliver the care. Innovation is arrived through relying on new or exiting information.
Innovation is, in my opinion, one of the key things we have to focus on in terms of innovation in procuring and buying products, but also in terms of how services are delivery how products are going to influence service delivery, and how that is going to result in increased capacity to see more patients and move those patients through the system. We face a lot of barrier, but I’m confident that we can eliminate them if we work together.
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