The HIMSS healthcare event is branded as the place to learn what the future of healthcare might have in store. It features a wide range of startups and larger technology companies and provides a range of visions for the future. Most of these visions feature combinations of data, AI, genomics, wearables and other technologies that are well known to us all.
That is, they are well known to us all via their applications in other industries. They’re not well known to many of us via their application in healthcare, however, where the lived reality is usually somewhat more analog. While attending events like HIMSS, there is a distinct sense of so-called “make and sell” involved, with companies certain that if they can only make a nice enough product that it will inevitably transform healthcare for the better.
That this hasn’t happened is seemingly a temporary aberration, with the potency of the technology inevitably likely to win out and achieve the transformational results promised. Of course, this assumes that technology is the most important factor in the transformation of healthcare. The reality is rather different.
“Many healthcare providers fall foul of new technology introduced into old organizational processes, which typically results in costly wastage,” Hal Woolf, President & CEO, HIMSS explains. “When you go to implement a new technology there is a learning period, and during that learning period it’s vital to recognize that you will slow down during that learning period before things get faster.”
I wrote last year about the crucial role slack plays in integrating innovations into any organization, as new technologies will need to be tested, new processes introduced, training on the new ways of working delivered, and so on. All of these things take time, energy, and money. The process of change also means that things will quite probably get marginally worse before the improvements kick in as any kinks in the new approach are ironed out.
Running to stand still
Of course, healthcare providers never really had that kind of slack even before Covid stretched hospitals and other service providers even tighter. In the U.K.’s NHS, for instance, over 2 million people are waiting over 18 weeks for treatment due to a toxic combination of Covid backlogs, staff burnout, and cash shortages.
The question healthcare innovators should surely be asking, therefore, is not whether any given technology makes sense, nor even whether a healthcare provider would like to implement it or not, but instead whether there is a realistic prospect of doing so. Just as politics is often referred to as the “art of the possible”, so too to a large extent is innovation in healthcare.
“At the moment, the financial situation in Finnish healthcare is very stringent,” Visa Honkanen, Director of Strategic Development at Clever Health Network, a health technology ecosystem coordinated by Helsinki University Hospital, told me. “This means that we really have to pull solutions to us based upon what we realistically have the resources to absorb. It’s in no one’s interest to waste effort, whether from an entrepreneur, a clinician, or a large company.”
While startups have become somewhat enthralled by the “lean” methodology in recent years, it seems that the notion of a “pull” system has passed many in the entrepreneurial ecosystem by, with the predominant focus being on the supply side of the equation and helping to both create startups or innovations, and then pushing those out to the market.
There is next to no support given on the demand side in terms of creating sufficient spare capacity within healthcare providers so that they can pull innovations through. A study from the Innovation Unit outlined a number of things that could help to create such demand. The paper explored why innovations get stuck in small pockets and don’t spread throughout the NHS.
Supporting change
The researchers examined 10 projects that had managed to scale successfully to try and uncover aspects of each project that point to some common trends. For instance, they highlight that scaling innovation can be a full-time job in its own right, and largely impossible to do alongside frontline delivery. As a result, they argue that dedicated organizations are often required to help to drive scaling efforts.
“I think we’re beginning to understand that it takes a village to raise health innovations, and getting things into use at scale is a difficult process,” Lauri Kuronen, Senior Business Advisor at Health Capital Helsinki, says. “So if that means we have to have external resources deployed to help clinical teams adopt and scale up new technologies, then that is what will need to happen.”
Such support is seldom supplied by the various accelerators, incubators, and VCs that operate in the healthcare space, with nearly all focusing their energies instead on the entrepreneurs themselves and not on establishing the market conditions for scaling.
If transformation is to really occur in healthcare, it’s vital that those taking up innovations are given as much support as innovators themselves. After all, the concept of “20% time” was widely popularized a few years ago for its ability to give employees sufficient slack to explore new ways of working. The very concept of such support seems faintly absurd in healthcare systems that are stretched to breaking point, but without such attempts, it seems inevitable that innovations will struggle to gain the traction all parties hope for.
