Healthcare IT News: Innovation is much more than just using new tech

“Innovation is one of the most sought-after things in healthcare, but it’s also one of the most poorly understood, according to experts presenting at the Digital and Personal Connected Health conference Monday at HIMSS18. ‘The term innovation loses so much meaning, and one of the meanings that it gets is “It’s innovation if it uses products designed by Apple,”‘ David Asch, MD, executive director at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, said in his keynote address. ‘Many of us love Apple products because of the design, but I’ve heard too many people say “We’re doing innovation because we’re using iPads.”‘ Even outside of Apple, the assumption that all innovation needs to be technological is a problematic one. ‘I think technology for technology’s sake is a mistake,’ Luis Castillo, president and CEO of Ensocare, said on a leadership panel. ‘If you’re automating a bad process it’s still a bad process.’ Instead, Asch said, innovation needs to be undertaken the way hospitals take on research. ‘Innovation is like research,’ he said. ‘It’s hypothesis-driven, it’s falsifiable and it’s highly disciplined.’ One problem that many organizations have innovating is they don’t recognize that step one is to identify the problem. ‘Often we are solving for the wrong problem, and if we solved for the right problem we might be in a better position to address our customers’ needs,’ Asch said. ‘Until you identify the problem you fundamentally want to solve, you can innovate in the wrong direction.’ Read more at Healthcare IT News.