Types of Innovation in Healthcare Management

Types of Innovation in Healthcare Management

Innovation in healthcare management is best analysed by its impact on stakeholders. In this context, innovation can be either non-disruptive or disruptive (Christensen et al., 2000).

Disruptive Innovation: This refers to radical, transformational, or revolutionary strategies of creating new markets to deliver dramatic new value opportunities. Disruptive innovation is widely used by entrepreneurs–particularly in Silicon Valley—to describe events such as tech start-ups toppling bigger organizations. The theory of disruptive innovation was invented by a Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, who acknowledged that the concept is misconstrued and erroneously applied to businesses that are not truly disruptive. For example (Christensen et al., 2006), Uber is commonly cited as an example of disruptive innovation due to its revolutionary presence in the taxi-cab industry. According to Christensen, who coined the term in a 1997 masterpiece titled ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma,’ the ride-hailing app does not represent true disruptive innovation. In 2015, Christensen—in partnership with Michael Raynor and Rory McDonald—wrote another article for the Harvard Business Review for the purpose of squashing the confusion about disruptive innovation (Christensen et al., (2015). The scholars, thus, defined it as ‘gaining competitive advantage against bigger organizations by targeting segments of the market neglected by competitors whose focus is on more profitable areas.’ This implies that innovation is not just about improving products and services but exploiting new areas previously neglected by industry leaders (Christensen., 1995; Ab Rahman et al., 2017).

On this backdrop, disruptive innovation in healthcare management is defined as ‘the application of advanced technology in clinical research.’ It also refers to strategies adapted to enhance user experience through new healthcare system that provides more accessible and individualized services. Fundamentally, disruptive innovations in healthcare influence introduction of new systems that provide a continuum of care focused on handling each patient’s health needs—instead of concentrating more on urgent health crises and complex disorders. Advanced diagnostic and therapeutic technologies have therefore empowered nurses and physician assistants to competently diagnose and treat disorders that previously required presence of a physician (Lardner., 1998; Christensen et al., 2016).

Figure 2.3 Disruptive Innovation by Low-end Organizations

Adapted from Clayton Christensen (1997)

Some examples of disruptive innovations are:

• Consumer devices, wearables, and apps: Previous innovations in healthcare management only allowed patients to get their biometric data, heart rate, pulse, blood pressure and blood oxygen from the doctor’s office. New technologies allow care users to take control of their own health. Although physicians use data gathered from wearables and apps to make treatment decisions, there are legal and ethical concerns about the security of data shared over the internet.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning: AI technologies have significantly improved management of patient data, scheduling, billing etc. For example, chatbots with natural language processing system can answer questions from care users 24/7, thus, bridging communication distance, saving time, and reducing costs. AI applications ultimately helps doctors and staff to focus on patient care.
• Internet of Things (IoT): IoT enhances use of data collated from wearables, sensors, apps, and other devices to discover disease clusters and accurately suggest effective solutions.
• Blockchain: This area of innovation in healthcare management focuses on database technology—particularly how security measures such as encryption can be applied to ensure security of data received, stored, and shared between patients and health providers.
• Big data and electronic health records (EHRs): EHRs are an integral part of patient care. The focus is on how EHR data can be safely used in research to improve care, expand, and create new business opportunities, and build AI applications.

Non-disruptive Innovation: Although innovation is crucial for business survivability, organizations must recognize that application of innovative strategies can improve or diminish competitiveness. However, proponents of disruptive innovative argue that organizations must assume the position of a disruptor to avoid disruption. But evidence-based research shows disruption can inflict damages on both the disrupter and companies being disrupted. Non-disruptive innovation is focused on sustaining existing strategies or simply improving something that already exists to continually achieve new, better opportunities or solve known issues. Basically, non-disruptive innovation occurs when a company delves into a new market without displacing competitors—because there was none in the segment before. Some multibillion-dollar industries have been established in recent years through nondisruptive creation (e.g. health clubs, Viagra, online dating, microfinance, routers, ringtones, crowdfunding, network devices and switches, among others).

Non-disruptive innovation is widely overlooked even though it explores new business horizons without negative impact on workers (such as downsizing) or displacement of established brands. Thus, managers who perceive innovation as a disruptive strategy tend to underrate broad opportunities for growth, and modern-day healthcare organizations cannot afford to fail from biased thinking.

A myriad of literature in health care management has studied healthcare creations such as new diagnostic procedures, drugs, therapies, and medical devices ranging from wearables, apps, sensors, or even neural-controlled prosthetic limbs used by injured military personnel. The inventions include cancer-combatting immunotherapies. Most scholars agree that an invention transforms to an innovation because it has been used to create new values. This is not disruptive in nature. Therefore, health innovation is often ‘non-disruptive’ when it is a result of converting existing inventions to new uses (e.g. health app on smart devices, iWatch etc). As innovations in healthcare accelerates rapidly, non-disruptive strategies promise to bring about exponential changes in the areas of disease prevention, more personalized care, and more comprehensive, better-integrated structural designs in healthcare organizations. This non-disruptive change is expected to transform the current encounter-based model to a population-based model, and the paradigm shift shows that disruptive technologies can be used in non-disruptive systems. Thus, disruptive innovation adapts disruptive inventions in new processes that enhance sharing of information/data across care settings and sectors (e.g., hospitals, laboratories, specialists, primary care providers, public health, pharmacies, long-term care) for the purpose of improving health outcomes for the entire population, and at the same time, reducing costs.

The problem is: most hospitals and health systems are basically conservative in nature—without capacity for innovation. But innovation in healthcare management requires a risk-taking mindset despite the huge amount’s governments invest in academic medical research to improve clinical practice and basic science.

Following the lead of Mayo Clinic’s Centre for Innovation, which has been honing its capabilities and collaborative approach and sharing insights since its inception in 2001, we are beginning to see early signs of positive disruption across the country; for example, Intermountain Healthcare and Geisinger Health System have made commitments to innovation.

In the past few decades, most of the innovation in healthcare has been the core of the development of new diagnostic procedures, drugs, medical devices, and therapies. These modern tactics include new pharmaceutical agents and novel procedures for more precise diagnostic scanners. Such technological advancements have also managed to produce a few stunning outcomes.

In the long run, the emphasis on innovation in healthcare will strengthen rapidly and bring about considerable transformation in crucial areas of the industry. Domains such as prevention, more personalized care as per the patient’s preferences and genetics, more efficient and technology-powered car models along with integrated organizational designs and add-on creative technological options for superior healthcare delivery.

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2.1.2 Models of Innovation in Healthcare Management

2.1.3 Theories of Innovation in Healthcare Management

2.2 An Overview of Healthcare Innovation

The health care industry can be difficult for innovation. There are a whole host of challenges that make it difficult to drive change — and many who try quickly get discouraged. Some of these challenges result from necessary features of the industry, such as regulation, research, and ethical standards. Others — like policy debates, outdated systems, and an overwhelming amount of red tape — are problems that need to be solved as soon as possible.

2.2.1 Healthcare Innovation Ecosystem

2.2.2 Adopting and Implementing Innovation in Healthcare Management

2.2.3 The Impact of Innovation in Healthcare Management

2.3 Healthcare innovation: A Global Perspective

2.3.1 Healthcare innovation in Africa

2.3.2 Healthcare innovation in Nigeria

2.4 Challenges and Prospects of Healthcare Innovation

2.5 Conclusion

Another area of interest is the cultural divide between healthcare professionals and technology specialists. This widening gap should be bridged through government interventions for the benefit of PHC systems. Interestingly, some change-oriented groups have already launched initiatives to support collaborations among diverse associations of health professionals and technologists. The efforts promote an ongoing and focused dialogue required to attain global primary care objectives. But even when the expected collaboration is achieved, there will be great need for the target group (communities) to understand benefits of the optimal combination of tools in technology-based care delivery systems. Thus, healthcare managers and administrators should maintain focus on how to integrate/deploy new health technologies in a way that adds value for all relevant stakeholders.

It is also important to add that there are reasons to be both excited and cautious about developments in healthcare management. For example, studies show that by leveraging technology, healthcare organizations can conduct broadened research in a little time, use input from more diverse survey participants, and simultaneously analyse more hypotheses to provide answers to many research questions than ever before. With technology adoption, statisticians may also discover how data mining and machine learning together with massive volumes of data can underplay the relevance of inferential statistics.

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