One of the core themes of my book The Eye for Innovation is that innovation is not something just for the gifted and creative people who devise new products and services, but is something we all can do if we continually think, “There’s gotta be a better way.” I also emphasize that motivation and awareness are two key characteristics of innovative people and innovative organizations.
In an earlier entry in this blog I mentioned that the greatest opportunity for innovation today is probably innovation in the systems, such as healthcare, within which we live. An article in the May 30 Wall Street Journal, forcibly reminded me of just how true that is. This is an excerpt from that article entitled “The Informed Patient”:
When her 18 month old daughter Josie died after a series of medical mistakes at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore six years ago, Sorrel King was consumed by grief and anger, wanting to destroy the hospital and even end her own life. But with three other children to live for, she and her husband Tony decided they had to help fix a broken system. ‘We had to do something good that would prevent this from ever happening to a child again,’ Ms. King says. When the hospital offered a financial settlement, Ms. King, a former fashion designer who had become a stay-at-home mom, asked Johns Hopkins to take some of the money back to start a children’s safety program. She also created the Josie King Foundation to fund safety initiatives at other hospitals. Now, to take the message to a broader audience of both consumers and medical professionals, she is launching a new website, josieking.org, with her own blog on patient safety; an online community where families can post their medical error experiences sand provide emotional support; advice from medical and legal experts on how to avoid error and deal with it when occurs; and resources for hospitals seeking to improve safety.
The article goes on to talk about a grassroots patient safety movement of which Ms. King is one of the leaders. The article further describes a pilot program called Condition Help at the University of Pittsburg Medical Center which is sponsored by the Josie King Foundation. The article goes on to say:
Condition Help is a hot line families can call to summon a ‘rapid response’ team of specialists inside the hospital if they feel that a patient is in danger and isn’t receiving the necessary attention. Beth Kuzminsky, a nurse and associate at UPMC’s Center of Quality Improvement and Innovation, says at first the program was unsettling to doctors and nurses, who worried that it would scare patients, and would reflect badly on them if a family used the call line. But staffers were convinced that the system wouldn’t be abused by patients. Since July 2005, a Condition H has been called 62 times, she notes. And the data suggest that 69% of the incidents would have led to potentially harmful patient situations if Condition H hadn’t been called. The program will be expanded in January to all of UPMC’s 14 acute-care hospitals.
This is innovation at work in the most rewarding way imaginable. You, too, can be an innovator. It all starts with caring intensely about something.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Technorati Tags: Innovation, Healthcare, Technology
Comments