From how to eliminate obstacles preventing digital transformation at health systems to how to pick the right digital health companies as partners, here are seven quotes about the role of innovation in healthcare hospital executives have shared with Becker's since March 9.
Roshan Navagamuwa. CIO of CVS Health: Healthcare organizations should invest in technologies and develop frameworks that enable agility while maintaining product integrity and security. For example, hybrid cloud architectures are helping provide the speed and security to deliver new applications sooner, with mechanisms for continuous improvement. AI and machine learning are helping to automate manual processes and save time for both consumers and providers, while reducing costs. But the way that AI has evolved today, too many organizations treat it as a bolt-on technology.
B.J. Moore. CIO at Providence (Renton, Wash.): Cloud is where innovation and scale are occurring, so any investment on solutions that are natively for on-premises represent a step in the wrong direction.
Kolaleh Eskandanian, PhD. Chief Innovation Officer at Children's National Hospital (Washington, D.C.): What kills innovation is inaction and not leveraging pandemic lessons to continue developing novel solutions for patient care models, novel therapies and effective diagnostics. The innovation killer would be going back to the pre-pandemic state of mind.
Jason Wells. Chief Strategy, Consumer and Innovation Officer at Adventist Health (Roseville, Calif.): A health tech company that is not partnership material is one that is mostly focused on the art of the sale and not on the overall patient outcomes the partnership is intended to drive. We look hard for partners that aren’t simply vendors and ultimately their greatest passion is to improve health and well-being for all.
Atefeh Riazi. CIO at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (New York City): If you look at the impacts of microbes across the tree of life or in the human body, what you see is that life incorporates many species that depend on each other for health and survival, such as the variety of bacteria that coexist with humans and plants. Without these, humans and plants would not survive. In the same way, technology and humans depend on each other for survival. Technology and humans are shifting to abiotic interactions. This will result in human evolution and our biology transitioning from being solely carbon-based to being carbon- and silicon-based.
Brad Shaink. Administrative Director of Innovation at Houston Methodist: There's too much concern over failure, which is leading to a lack of innovation. Hospitals and health systems should have an appreciation and deep respect for learning and be OK with the idea that not all innovative ideas will have quick solutions and not all innovative ideas will work.
Tom Barnett. CIO at Baptist Memorial Health Care (Memphis, Tenn.): The essence of digital transformation is the ability to boil patient touch points down to their essence and only what is necessary, then make the behind-the-scenes workflow less cumbersome by reducing silos and friction points, and then accelerate the entire throughput with carefully selected and complementary technology. Understanding those critical components of the equation is how you can end up making huge impacts.