Say healthcare innovation and it’s easy to picture what’s next.
Artificial intelligence. Robotics. Precision medicine. New devices. New drugs. Technologies capable of changing how we diagnose and treat disease.
Those advances are exciting, and many have the potential to fundamentally change healthcare.
But some of the innovations that make the biggest difference in someone’s healthcare experience will never make a headline.
Sometimes innovation is simply making something that is unnecessarily difficult work better.
Not every problem needs a breakthrough
Consider the everyday frustrations that have become normal in healthcare.
- A patient waits months for an appointment.
- A physician spends time tracking down information that already exists somewhere else.
- Two care teams treating the same patient aren’t communicating.
- A new provider is ready to see patients but is waiting on an administrative process.
- A patient leaves an appointment unsure about what happens next.
None of those problems necessarily require revolutionary new technology. They require someone to notice the friction and decide it doesn’t have to be there.
That may mean changing a process. Connecting two teams. Sharing information differently. Removing unnecessary steps. Or giving someone the authority to solve a problem they already understand.
It may not sound particularly innovative. But for the person whose experience just got better, it can make a big difference.
We tend to value novelty more than improvement
There’s something inherently appealing about building something completely new.
New technology attracts attention. Big ideas generate excitement. Transformation sounds more important than process improvement.
But innovation shouldn’t be measured by how impressive the solution sounds.
It should be measured by whether something works better afterward.
- Did a patient get care sooner?
- Did a physician get more time back for patients?
- Did we eliminate unnecessary work?
- Did information reach the right person at the right time?
- Did we prevent someone from falling through a gap?
If the answer is yes, something meaningful changed.
Look for the friction
One of the most useful questions healthcare leaders can ask may also be one of the simplest: What are people working around every day?
- Workarounds are clues. When employees build spreadsheets because systems don’t communicate, that’s a clue.
- When patients repeatedly call because they don’t understand what happens next, that’s a clue.
- When physicians develop their own process for getting information they need, that’s a clue.
- When an organization adds people to manage a process that everyone agrees is inefficient, that’s a clue.
Over time, workarounds can become so familiar that we stop seeing the underlying problem. The opportunity for innovation often starts with seeing it again.
Listen to the people who experience the problem
The people best positioned to identify those opportunities aren’t always sitting in an innovation department. They’re often the people doing the work.
- A physician who encounters the same obstacle every day doesn't need a task force to tell them the obstacle exists.
- A person scheduling appointments may understand exactly why patients struggle to get through the process.
- An operator may know which three steps could disappear tomorrow without anyone missing them.
The challenge for organizations is creating a path between knowing something could work better and actually making it better.
“One of the things we’re trying to build at One Health is a culture where people don’t learn to accept unnecessary friction,” says Ali Karim, Founder of One Health. “If something isn’t working, we want people to ask why and feel empowered to help find a better way.”
Sometimes that produces a big idea. Often, it produces a small one. Both matter.
Technology is a tool, not the definition
None of this minimizes the enormous potential of technology in healthcare.
Artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies may eliminate administrative work, improve clinical decision-making,
connect information and solve problems we haven’t been able to solve before.
But technology is most powerful when we start with the problem rather than the tool.
What are we trying to make better?
For whom?
What is getting in the way today?
And what is the simplest way to change it?
Sometimes the answer will be sophisticated technology.
Sometimes it will be a better process.
The innovation is the improvement, not the mechanism.
Small changes can create bigger ones
There’s another reason seemingly unexciting innovation matters.
Small improvements compound.
Save a physician ten minutes on something they do six times a day and you’ve created an hour for something else.
Remove one unnecessary handoff and you may eliminate delays that affect hundreds of patients.
Solve a recurring operational problem in one location and you may discover a better way of working that can scale across an organization.
The individual change may be small.
Its impact doesn’t have to be.
Make better the goal
Healthcare needs big ideas.
It needs new technologies, new treatments and people willing to imagine things that don’t exist today.
But it also needs people willing to look at something everyone else has learned to tolerate and say, this could work better.
Then make it better.
At One Health, that’s how we think about innovation.
Sometimes it means building something entirely new.
Sometimes it means connecting things that should have been connected all along.
And sometimes it means removing five unnecessary steps from someone’s day.
The best innovation isn’t always the most exciting idea. It’s the one that makes healthcare better.
