Interdisciplinarity, Innovation, and Transforming Healthcare (Chapter 14 from Disrupt Together)

Book excerpt: Healthcare presents unique challenges for innovators. Its problems are complex, and resist single-domain solutions, and require an interdisciplinary, system-level perspective. This challenges comfortable patterns of work and thought, and long-standing organizational arrangements. Now, discover a complete framework and powerful techniques for designing and implementing healthcare innovation that works. Interdisciplinarity, Innovation, and Transforming Healthcare is part of Philadelphia University's breakthrough approach to innovation: one that links business, design and engineering, and delivers extraordinary results in both new and existing ventures. First, Dr. Stephen Spinelli and Heather McGowan introduce this "Disrupt Together" approach, explain its deep roots in design thinking, and show how it generates far more high-value ideas for innovation. Next, Dr. James E. Stahl drills down to focus specifically on innovation in healthcare. Dr. Stahl explains how to facilitate the true interdisciplinarity at the heart of healthcare innovation, rather than simply throwing people from different disciplines together and hoping for the best. He introduces key tools drawn from multiple disciplines, showing how to solve "wicked problems" by improving interaction amongst clinicians, engineers, economists, designers, social scientists, entrepreneurs, nurses, psychologists, and others. He also presents a complete case study: creating the Operating Room of the future, which required taking two ORs offline to identify, test, and prototype solutions in a real-world simulation. Interdisciplinarity, Innovation, and Transforming Healthcare is one of 15 e-chapters addressing all facets of innovation, from design processes and team development to business models and value delivery. Each is crafted by a pioneering business innovator – and they all integrate into today's most coherent, realistic blueprint for innovation. For all entrepreneurs, executives, managers, strategists, and students who want to drive more value from innovation. James E. Stahl, M.D., C.M., M.P.H., is a practicing board-certified internist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Senior Scientist at the MGH-Institute for Technology Assessment, Research Director for the MGH Outpatient RFID project, and Adjunct Professor in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University. He is an outcomes researcher with expertise in decision science, health technology assessment, and simulation modeling. His research focuses on redesigning clinical processes, applying and implementing new technologies in the clinical environment, interdisciplinary collaboration, and ethics.