John Brownstein, MD, chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital, joined the Becker's Healthcare podcast to discuss big partnerships between industry and healthcare delivery organizations and sparking inspiration.
Below is an excerpt from the discussion. Click here to hear the full episode.
Question: You've been at Boston Children's Hospital for almost 18 years. Can you talk a little bit about the growth and pride in the hospital?
Dr. John Brownstein: I've been at Boston Children's for a very long time, and it's been an amazing place to spend my career thus far. We've seen changes at the institutional level and appreciation for innovation, which happens at the top. Boston Children's was one of the first hospitals, let alone pediatric hospitals, to invest in innovation and truly digital health, and really recognize that innovation can come from our providers and researchers. There's an opportunity to think about new ways beyond research to see the impact of our know-how and bring intelligence into care decisions with support tools and technologies so we can expand the reach of this hospital.
It's been a unique journey. We've done incredible partnerships with companies like Amazon and Google and their [healthcare] spinoff. We've come a long way.
Q: When you look at innovation, how do you prioritize where you focus your team's efforts?
JB: As an innovation group, you can get very distracted by a lot of shiny objects and innovations that may not be the most valuable for patients and providers. We have a really strong sourcing strategy that starts with real enterprise-level goals where we're trying to understand areas that might be impactful, like primary care behavioral health.
We also do a deep dive from the bottom up. We're trying to learn from the staff, whether it's on the clinical side or administrative side, where the major issues are. As opposed to getting wrapped up in whatever buzzword of the day, we want to point our team toward where we're going to be highly evidence-based in terms of selective [projects]. For us, that is the best pathway to actually implementing and scaling innovations within our organization.
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