Uncertainty is the name of the game for many industries today, including healthcare. With rapidly emerging technologies, regulations and changing consumer demands, companies must manage differently in order to keep up. Jeff Dyer, innovation visionary and co-author of the highly acclaimed, The Innovator’s DNA and its follow-on publication, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators highlighted the threat to many companies today – predicting that 50 percent of the S&P 500 will be replaced over the next 10 years.

Human-Centered Innovation

As consumer experiences across nearly every industry become more personalized, on-demand and targeted, he encouraged pushing our thinking beyond meeting functional needs by looking at social and emotional ones as well. By doing so, companies are able to identify unmet needs that can be catalysts for more useful solutions that ultimately win in the market.

The GE Adventure Series Scanner, an MRI scanner designed for children to make scanning a less frightening experience, was a prime example shared of human-centered innovation. While advanced in functional features, what was discovered through observing young patients getting a scan was that the former machine was intimidating – the designer learning that as many as 80 percent of pediatric patients had to be sedated in order to sit still long enough for the scan.  Witnessing this, a new approach was taken, ultimately applying human-centered design methods to redesign the experience as a series of “adventures” for children, delighting and no longer scaring its young users.

The Big Picture in Quality Care

While human-centered innovation can be applied product by product and interaction by interaction, we heard another thought-provoking point from the day’s presentations – that it’s really hard to detect poor quality care through one interaction. The path to a poor outcome most likely includes bouncing from doctor to doctor and breakdowns in coordination and communication between interactions. Often, the big picture reveals the flaws.

The reality today is that many people still get prescriptions from multiple, independent physicians, and many hospital admissions come with undiagnosed behavioral health concerns. The healthcare system has an immense opportunity to come together around the whole patient and to better identify needs at a population level to deliver on value-based care that leads to healthier outcomes.

Physician Collaboration

Our physician panel sparked further ideas in how to collaborate with PCP’s, nurses and other care workers to better meet patients’ needs. Often at the front lines of the patient experience, creativity in finding unidentified needs was discussed as pivotal to creating an effective healthcare experience. While concepts of self-directed, consumer-focused healthcare and increasing consumer participation in healthcare decisions have become popular, the role of physicians is also being transformed. Their responsibility is increasingly to supplement and put into perspective available information, manage expectations, and instill confidence. The discussion thus encouraged leveraging physicians as “natural, trained problems solvers”, bringing them into the ideation for a better patient experience, and empowering them with action-oriented data and decision support along the way.

We thank all of our leaders, clients and partners for joining us in a memorable and energizing event. We look forward to our next gathering in January 2017.

The room at the inaugural Magellan Open Vision Exchange (MOVE) this past March was a sight to see. Filled with a buzz of energy and openness to think differently, Magellan executives, clients and partners gathered in shared pursuit of a better, more efficient healthcare experience of tomorrow. Collectively, the leaders in the room had impact over the healthcare experience for a significant portion of America. Yet, the focus of the conversation was clearly in how to pivot care to be more accessible and effective, one person at a time.

Help One, Help Many

The event kicked off with stories from Mick Ebeling, CEO of Not Impossible Labs, whose commitment to changing the lives of a few individuals has sparked a few of the most impactful innovations in healthcare. From his entrée into healthcare innovation with the eyewriter, helping a graffiti artist paralyzed by ALS to create art again using his eyes, to Project Daniel, a 3D prosthetic printing process that started with the goal of creating an arm for a Sudanese boy, he challenged the group to “recognize an absurdity” and then to “just commit to figuring it out.”

Neither an engineer nor a healthcare expert, his “open source” method for creating healthcare inventions turned heads. He demonstrated a commitment to designing a solution through the eyes of the individual suffering, which made all the difference in his ability to impact lives. He reminded us that he did not have all of the answers -far from it. But asserted that a key point to breaking the mold was to think of challenges as “not impossible.” He reminded us that it would be very difficult to name something that is possible today that wasn’t at one point thought of as impossible.

Healthcare as an Experience

Our client presentations continued to emphasize applications of human-centered innovation in healthcare, sharing approaches grounded in first understanding the behaviors that drive and influence healthcare experience. Key takeways included:

• Remembering that the most common reasons for a hospital stay are the more common ailments of mankind, from childbirth to respiratory and circulatory conditions, musculoskeletal conditions and mood disorders. While emphasis is often placed on advancement in rarer, more specialized conditions, a significant portion of patients can be impacted by anticipating the needs for more routine healthcare experiences.
• Listening to what’s working, and what’s not, disease state by disease state. From crowdsourcing feedback from patients to understand what helped them get better, to creating focused innovation platforms within organizations to spawn creative solutions unencumbered by traditional perceived barriers, we learned of many approaches to closing gaps in the system.
• Speaking to people successfully living with their conditions provides tremendous perspective for recovery and chronic condition management programs. When the formula isn’t as simple as issue identification + treatment = healthy, concepts like peer support become an opportunity to support living well with a physical, mental or emotional challenge by empowering the patient to learn to thrive through peer experience.
• Re-positioning healthcare leaders as “chief experimenters.” It was underscored that healthcare leaders today can’t simply focus on making decisions, they must design and enable experiments to truly push the healthcare experience forward.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our event recap.

Looking for more information about MOVE, our gathering of healthcare innovators and thought leaders? View media and request an invitation to our January 2017 event. For questions, contact mediarelations@magellanhealth.com.