Considering Disruption & Innovation as a Means to Create Change

Considering Disruption & Innovation as a Means to Create Change: Define It, and Create A Structure to Support It, Without Focusing Solely on Technology

As a healthcare industry, we have accepted our fate that we need to fundamentally change our approach to delivering care and create a future focused on prevention, wellness and optimizing one’s own health. To do this, we will need to continually reinvent and refine how we provide access to services and activate consumers while ensuring much better adherence. Underlying all of this is our need to create change and new approaches, grounded in new technology, delivery models and engagement techniques. In order for us to accomplish this shift, it is critical that we understand disruption and innovation as separate but complementary concepts, create a structure to help our organizations identify disruption, and understand how we will react and respond to disruption. 

What is disruption in healthcare? While disruption is a “buzzword” often used across multiple industries, we need to have a foundational understanding of what that means for healthcare. At Navicent Health, we created our Center for Disruption and Innovation (CfDI) to provide clarity around these concepts, but also a structure that allows us to ultimately create a culture of change at our organization. Let’s take the definition first. When we speak about disruption, we define that as “any force, external or internal, that has the ability to fundamentally impact a business or clinical model.” When we think about innovation, we see that as “the means to create, or respond to, disruption of a market, organization or industry, leveraging new, revised and unique models.” Furthermore, when we think about our ability to create change, which is a primary outcome of the work we do with disruption, we have a simple model of “innovation –> adaption –> change.” Considering this further, we need to identify the right types of innovation that leads to adapting (not adopting, because you have to adapt an innovation to your specific and unique market and circumstances). Ultimately, this yields the creation of change which will support the evolution of our industry into one optimizing health, instead of just healthcare. 

Establishing the right structure to support both the evaluation and creation of disruption through innovation is foundational to any successful effort to create change. There are dozens (or perhaps hundreds!) of examples globally, but at Navicent Health, we created one that has continued to evolve and has proven successful to date.  This structure has grounded our efforts to align with start-ups, address ongoing internal opportunities for improved efficiencies, appropriately “scan the horizon” for technology and models that can disrupt us (and determine how we will respond to that disruption), share the lessons learned and new knowledge through research, and commercialize the right solutions. Fundamental to all of this are the meaningful partnerships we have established both internally and externally across the world, as we began with a basic premise that we cannot do all of this work by ourselves and we are better because of the partnerships we have established. 

Often, when people think about disruption in the healthcare industry, they automatically gravitate toward new technologies as the source of all innovation. New innovative and disruptive technologies are an incredibly important tool to be used in advancing health across our industry and we all know examples that are in various phases of implementation, development, or conceptualization (e.g., virtual reality, artificial intelligence, wearables, ingestibles, absorbables, sensors, apps, etc.). However, while the creation of new and refined technologies is certainly needed, it is just as important to understand the importance of addressing the underlying process or model and not just the technology. If you place a new technology over a dysfunctional process or model … you’ll likely still have a dysfunctional process or model that hasn’t been addressed. Organizations need a balance between the technologies and the underlying models or processes for optimal creation of change to be achieved.

While we continue to learn each day, the disruption and innovation philosophy we’ve established, coupled with the structure and process described, has allowed us to be successful in implementing innovations, reducing costs and creating new revenue streams across our enterprise, thus realizing change that prepares us to be more relevant and sustainable within the new evolving healthcare model.  This is the true measure of addressing disruption as something for which we evaluate and determine our response, while also creating impactful disruption that benefits our patients and the health of our communities. 

Originally appeared in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, October 2018