How do you create a culture of innovation?
Cultures of innovation ultimately just mean creative cultures that apply great problem-solving skills that people would want to work in. But change is difficult. … In the case of Sutter, it’ s a century old, and you don’ t just show up and change it overnight. Our approach has been to celebrate and fan the flames of the parts of the culture we’ d love to see more of... But for a culture of creativity, we find what we call micro-climates. Rather than trying to change 55,000 people overnight, which is difficult, let’ s find a coalition of the willing, and the microsites where we can create that change, and then fan the flames. We call those hatchery sites.
What makes a good‘ innovation hatchery?’
The simplest element we look for is having people that are attracted to change. They’ re up for it, they’ ll disrupt their workflow for it, they want to be a part of it and then, ultimately, other people will emulate those behaviors. I don’ t need to change 5,000 physician mindsets immediately, but if there are 50 that want to try something different, those are the groups we’ re going to gravitate to.
You speak about the need to increase the speed of innovation, and you look at these things in 90-day chunks. How did you decide on 90 days?
Despite popular belief, innovation loves constraint. The right amount of constraint is very liberating. We can spend too much time and money thinking about something and trying to perfect it only to find out it didn’ t do what we thought it was going to do. I’ ll give you an example. We have a live pilot in collaboration with Lyft ridesharing services. We knew it would be financially helpful because Lyft costs less than taxis. What we didn’ t know is just how efficient it was going to be. The arrival time for a taxi was anywhere from 15-50 minutes. Lyft was consistently 3-5 minutes. That created this predictability and efficiency that was unexpected.
Now we could have thought for a year about ways we could use a ridesharing service. But in this case, we said:‘ Let’ s do it for 100 patients in 90 days and see what happens.’ Within weeks we were through our 100-patient number because it was so popular. So 90 days is a good timeline to keep your momentum and not get stuck. It allows you to not get trapped in the cycles where you can end up spending a lot of money and socializing it with a lot of people only to find out in the end that it doesn’ t work.
Despite popular belief, innovation loves constraint. The right amount of constraint is very liberating.”
Are you ever afraid of moving too fast? Of being in such a hurry to get to a specific result that you make a serious mistake?
I wouldn’ t mind being known as the guy in health care that moved too fast. That said, I want to be really clear about something: When we get into the clinical domain [ and FDA approval, data security and HIPPA compliance ] we can slow out of the 90-day cycle. If we’ re evaluating a startup, for instance, we’ re asking them as they enter the door,‘ Is your product FDA-approved? Are there other health care systems that have used the thing?’ We’ re not talking about playing around with people’ s medications or how we’ re treating them clinically. But the honest truth is that health innovation moves very slow. The average time from a clinical breakthrough to dissemination across medical communities where that clinical breakthrough is being utilized is about 10 years. That can’ t keep happening. We can move faster; we can move more efficiently and ultimately you just
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