Technology Social Media and Updates

Most Health System Innovations Die Before Scaling

Many accuse health systems of not being willing to innovate. The truth? Lots of innovation is being explored all the time - you just don’t hear about them because most never make it to system-wide scale. For every 100 ideas that get explored within a health system: → 40 undergo lots of internal exploration but don’t achieve necessary buy-in to pilot. Maybe you have a clinical champion but lack buy-in from IT and leadership. Maybe you have top-down enthusiasm but no clinical champion. Lots of reasons ideas die here. → 30 pilots get launched but die off quick because of low user adoption. Maybe you couldn’t get it to fit the clinical workflow. Maybe there are too many competing priorities. Maybe the time to value is just too long. → 15 pilots have good user adoption but KPIs don’t improve. You figured out a way to successfully implement the innovation, but it doesn’t actually show a measurable improvement in clinical outcomes. It’s hard to create something that actually makes a difference on outcomes. → 10 pilots demonstrate improved clinical outcomes, but don’t translate to financial ROI from solving a real business problem - leading to no funding. There are lots of vitamins in healthcare, but only real painkillers tend to get sustainable funding. → 4 pilots demonstrate enough value and ROI to be operationally funded and sustained, BUT can’t grow beyond the initial use case or clinical area. It’s a niche innovation that only has executive sponsorship for a narrow area, but fails to reach escape velocity to justify system-wide transformation. → 1 innovation becomes operationally sustained enterprise-wide, leading to broad transformation across the health system. This is the innovation that the public catches wind of. Note that this isn’t specific to Health Tech - this is often the case for all types of innovation, including new models of care, clinical workflow innovations, AI models, etc. There is far more healthcare innovation being considered, tested and evaluated on an on-going basis than folks realize. It’s just honestly very difficult to earn the right to go from idea to pilot to local success to system-wide success. P.S. Please don’t hate me for there not being exactly 100 circles in the image. I just couldn’t convince the AI it to make the grid the way I wanted it to 😂