Lew McCreary

<article-ideainbrief class="article-ideainbrief">
 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">The Idea in Brief</h4>
 <div class="ideainbrief-contents">
  <p>In health care, the mother of all service industries, Kaiser Permanente is taking innovative approaches to designing better ways of delivering care. KP’s relatively modest up-front investments can yield dramatic cost and quality benefits more quickly than any whizbang technology.</p>
  <p>To achieve these benefits, Kaiser has adopted a “human-centered design” methodology that enlists health care providers and patients as collaborators in the innovation process.</p>
  <p>Stakeholder participation helps direct the creative inquiry toward better questions, which lead, in turn, to more sharply defined problems. That reduces the level of innovation risk while producing superior—often breakthrough—solutions.</p>
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</article-ideainbrief><p>Chris McCarthy shows up for an early-morning interview wearing raspberry-colored scrubs. Later he’ll head to one of Kaiser Permanente’s Bay Area hospitals to watch nurses at work. McCarthy, a KP innovation specialist, is just beginning a project aimed at optimizing the time nurses spend with their patients. He’s often in clinical settings, observing how health care providers do their jobs; how they interact with one another, with technology, and with patients; and how patients respond.</p>

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<p><span class="reprint">Reprint: R1009H</span></p>
<p>The Innovation Consultancy, a small team within the health care provider Kaiser Permanente, practices an expansive, service-focused version of innovation that is both rapid and economical in comparison with the conventional version. The team&#8217;s members observe how health care providers interact with one another, with technology, and with patients, and how the patients respond. They take photographs, draw pictures, write stories, and try to capture experiences from the point of view of everyone involved.</p>
<p>During KP MedRite, a project to reduce the error rate in dispensing medication to hospital patients, the team asked nurses what they thought was wrong with the dispensing process. The nurses usually replied, &#8220;Nothing.&#8221; But when given a chance to make self-portraits, they would draw themselves with sad faces and frazzled hair. Interruptions appeared to be the leading cause of errors&#8212;so one of the resulting innovations was a bright-yellow sash signaling that its wearer was not to be disturbed.</p>
<p>KP&#8217;s Chris McCarthy founded the Innovation Learning Network to accelerate knowledge transfer among peers in the nonprofit health care industry. One promising process that has emerged, Inflection Navigator, helps patients who&#8217;ve received a frightening diagnosis handle the consequent urgent tasks&#8212;follow-up tests, visits to specialists, decision making about treatment and care&#8212;with the aid of care coordinators. This innovation and others like it arise from a brand of creativity that transcends the media version of the health care debate.</p>

Kaiser Permanente&rsquo;s Innovation on the Front Lines

Reprint: R1009H The Innovation Consultancy, a small team within the health care provider Kaiser Permanente, practices an expansive, service-focused version of innovation that is both rapid and economical in comparison with the conventional version. The team’s members observe how health care providers interact with one another, with technology, and with patients, and how the patients respond. They take photographs, draw pictures, write stories, and try to capture experiences from the point of view of everyone involved. During KP MedRite, a project to reduce the error rate in dispensing medication to hospital patients, the team asked nurses what they thought was wrong with the dispensing process. The nurses usually replied, “Nothing.” But when given a chance to make self-portraits, they would draw themselves with sad faces and frazzled hair. Interruptions appeared to be the leading cause of errors—so one of the resulting innovations was a bright-yellow sash signaling that its wearer was not to be disturbed. KP’s Chris McCarthy founded the Innovation Learning Network to accelerate knowledge transfer among peers in the nonprofit health care industry. One promising process that has emerged, Inflection Navigator, helps patients who’ve received a frightening diagnosis handle the consequent urgent tasks—follow-up tests, visits to specialists, decision making about treatment and care—with the aid of care coordinators. This innovation and others like it arise from a brand of creativity that transcends the media version of the health care debate.

Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation on the Front Lines

Summary.

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