Innovation the Cleveland Clinic Way by Thomas J. Graham

Author:Thomas J. Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw Hill LLC
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Third-Degree Innovation: Synthetic

Synthetic innovation reflects the belief that innovation occurs best at the intersection of domains. Whether the commodity is knowledge, experience, resources, relationships, or even culture, uniting creative people and institutions is one of the most catalytic ways to advance innovation. Furthermore, allowing creatives to bring their life experiences into medical innovation can also pay dividends.

Innovation can come from a doctor-patient interaction at the bedside, a research inspiration at the laboratory bench, or seemingly out of thin air. When Anesthesia Institute chair David L. Brown, a general aviation and former military pilot, was making a cross-country flight, the advanced avionics controlling his plane inspired him to conceive a novel system to help manage patients’ anesthesia needs during surgery.

Much like a pilot, an anesthesiologist relies on numerous complex factors to keep patients safe while in the medically induced state that allows surgery to be performed painlessly and without recollection. Anesthesiologists, however, didn’t have computers or control towers to help guide clinicians to the correct decisions. In addition, complex surgeries can take many hours, and as is the case with all humans, clinicians are subject to fatigue and distraction.

Computers don’t have these stresses and are great vigilance monitors. Dr. Brown invented Decision Support Systems (DSS), which amplified physician judgment and increased capacity to manage multiple patients. DSS is like a tap on the shoulder to keep clinicians ahead of the case, providing anesthesia staff with an extra set of eyes and extensive cognitive processing power both to improve clinical and management decision making in the perioperative environment and to allow anesthesiologists to react more rapidly to potentially harmful trends.

DSS was commercialized and further developed by CCI’s ninth spin-off health information technology (HIT) company, Talis Clinical, LLC. The DSS platform has been combined with additional HIT tools to help manage patients in other acute care settings. The volume of hospitals, clinicians, and patients this technology benefits is remarkable.

Dr. Brown’s contribution exemplifies one form of synthetic innovation, in which the inventor removes partitions in his brain to allow mingling of experiences and expertise. When inventors feel that freedom to ideate, the job of the innovation leader is to remove roadblocks.

Cleveland Clinic’s most tangible expression of synthetic innovation at work on an institutional scale has been the Global Healthcare Innovations Alliance (GHIA), the largest consortium of academic medical centers (AMCs), research universities, and aligned corporate partners dedicated to mission-driven innovation. The alliance has paid dividends in co-invention and sharing of innovation culture.

Recommendations to inspire and capture synthetic innovation include:

Cross-pollinate within your own organization, across the street, across the country, or around the globe.

Be proactive about defining the rules by which partnerships will be executed, including joint management agreements and definitions on how ownership and distributions will be executed.

Consider relationships with organizations that don’t look like you. Whether bringing together urban and rural hospitals or combining healthcare entities with industrial giants, concentrate less on what each party does and more on how and why they do it. When you ensure cultural alignment first, complementary and supplementary facets are much easier to identify.

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