Skip to main content

"UAB Health System Announces Inaugural Innovation Award Winners."

While many health systems find it difficult to expand their focus much beyond day-to-day survival, a few recognize the power of teams with innovative ideas to drive measurable, long-term improvements in key strategic indicators. Example: the UAB Health System...
"The UAB Health System has announced the winners of its inaugural Innovation Awards, which acknowledge novel and inventive programs, policies, ideas and processes implemented in the last two years that have led to significant, measurable improvements in patient care and/or operational efficiency.

"The awards recognize best practices in UAB Health System entities and affiliates, with a goal of promoting widespread adoption of exceptional programs and ideas. Montgomery-based Baptist Health took first place in this first year of the program after the Health System CEO Council reviewed 36 nominations and selected three winners in each of two categories: Impact, for programs that have had the greatest positive effects on patient care or operations, and Creativity, for programs that demonstrate exceptional vision and imagination."
The ideas are out there to take your organization to the next level too. They're within your walls...locked up in your team's fearful heads, maybe?

Doesn't matter how big or how small your organization is, urban or rural, teaching or non-teaching. But here's the problem: ideas can be tough to recognize when they don't just show up on their own at the executive suite's oak-paneled doors. They need finding, nurturing, recognizing, supporting, funding and, yes, a little risk-taking. They need a process and a culture that values improvement and inquiry.

But they're out there, as long as you have teams of people asking What if...? Why not...?

What was first on the agenda at your most recent leadership meeting? Budget cutting or innovative problem-solving? I'll bet I know where UAB started.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information

Are the "Apocaholics" Wrong?

Will society avoid collapse and continue prospering? Yes, thanks to the innovators among us says zoologist and Economist editor Matt Ridley in his new book "The Rational Optimist." "...with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, (expect) bottom-up innovators to prevail. (Ridley's) prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.” We could still screw things up.  We could, for example, stifle innovation and trade while inflating the importance of restrictive bureaucracies. "Our progress is unsustainable...only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the preca