Chris Waugh serves as Chief Innovation Officer for Sutter Health.
On April 12th, Chris will speak on a panel at Becker's Hospital Review 9th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place April 11-14, 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Chris's session, click here.
Question: Who or what are the disruptors that have your attention? Why?
Chris Waugh: Healthcare is a complex industry that has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. Major companies like CVS, Apple and Amazon are entering healthcare.
Sutter Health aims to revolutionize healthcare, too, by making it simpler, engaging and more human. We approach innovation through human-centered design thinking. This is a practice that starts with the people you're designing for and ends with solutions that are personalized to meet their needs. It tends to rely more on creative approaches to problem solving and less on conventional methods.
So I'm excited and inspired by disrupters like Velano Vascular and Lyft, which view innovation as way to inspire and delight people while helping them heal.
Q: Please share a new consumer-centric capability your organization has built or tapped into within the past 18 months.
CW: We look at innovation holistically — it's more than just offering the latest gadget or technology. We're interested in how that technology can improve a person's healthcare experience.
For example, drawing blood remains an important part of medical care but needles can cause discomfort and anxiety. One of our hospitals was the first in California to pilot PIVO, a virtually painless way to draw blood. Through this new technology, our staff can draw blood through a peripheral IV line instead of piercing a person's vein every time a sample is needed. This creative approach limits the number of times a person is stuck by a needle and helps reduce accidental needle sticks among nurses and other care team members.
Every moment matters while patients are in our care. If we can help make them feel more at ease, then we are creating a healing experience at all levels.
Q: How do you define patient engagement?
CW: We are people before we are patients. I believe patient engagement comes from understanding and relating to patients as people first. This means we must care deeply about people and have empathy for them.
Empathy gets a layer deeper. It's not just listening to what people say but looking for what's really going on that they might not be saying. This is where many companies miss the mark. They'll send out a customer survey and design a new product because ""that's what our customers said they wanted in the survey."" If you go a layer deeper, you may find that what people really want is something very different than what they said.
For example, people may say they want their company to provide free lunch in the workplace. But, if you go a layer deeper, you may learn that people asked for lunch because they don't have time to get in the car and go somewhere because they're overloaded with work and their bosses haven't recognized the impact of that burden. So really, people may want recognition as much as food.
Empathizing means doing your best — even if you've never been in that context — to put yourself in the shoes of that person. And when you succeed, you also find patient engagement.