Entrepreneurs and health IT companies have poured billions of dollars into health innovations, but true innovation requires more than big money and ideas—it takes action and scalable implementation. This is a lesson the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation (CFI) has mastered. Find out how physicians are creating new solutions to optimize patient care in their communities and homes.
“We’re often asked [to explain] our mission at the Center for Innovation, and it’s simply this: To transform the delivery and experiences of health and health care,” CFI Medical Director Douglas Wood, MD (pictured right), said during a special session at the at the 2015 AMA Interim Meeting. “But this statement is purposeful because it starts with the concept of health.”
Dr. Wood said the CFI defines innovation as “discovering and implementing new ways to deliver better health.”
He notes that “there’s an important word in this definition, and that’s ‘implementing.’ Simply thinking about things you could do—ideating or brainstorming—is not innovation. Innovation has to be active and result in solutions that will make the lives of people better.”
How physicians at CFI design innovations
Designers and physicians at the center conduct observational research with patients, care staff and consultants to identify problems in patients’ lives and conceptualize solutions.
Using information from their research, Dr. Wood said CFI designers synthesize their observations into design concepts, which they use to create low-fidelity models and prototypes for scalable solutions physicians can implement in health care settings.
“The center has already conducted 10,000 hours of direct research for roughly 270 projects and 600 experiments in the last five years,” Dr. Wood said.
To help reduce care costs, Dr. Wood said the CFI has launched several special initiatives to “shift our care locations away from hospitals and clinics and to community care that is home-based.”
These initiatives do not isolate patients from physicians. Instead, they allow physicians to offer high-quality care and support for patients based on their individual needs. Some of these initiatives include:
- Wellness navigators—Social determinants of health can have a serious impact on patients’ medical conditions. That’s why CFI employs “wellness navigators,” who work with patients to help them secure crucial non-clinical resources such as refrigeration, heating and air-conditioning, and even jobs, Dr. Wood said.
- The Well-Living Laboratory—“People spend more than 90 percent of their time outside a physicians’ office or hospital … so the determinants of health are going to largely happen at home,” Dr. Wood said. The Well-Living Laboratory allows physicians at CFI to monitor patients within their office or living environment “to understand how things like lighting, air quality, noise and living structures” impact their health. The lab simulates realistic living and working environments, such as homes, offices, schools, communities and hotels in order to test, monitor and identify the efficacy of wellness-based interventions.
- Patient mobile apps—To enhance patients’ care experience, CFI has designed a unique and user-friendly app that allows patients to access important care information, such as customized health itineraries that list activities for patients to complete within and outside of the clinic, patient education resources and appointment times.
You can learn more about innovations at the Mayo Clinic by viewing the CFI’s full list of projects.
