Why Clinical Leaders Should Embrace Innovation

The latest advances in health care are leading to innovations that have the potential to improve not only clinical services and health outcomes but also convenience, delivery, and equality for caregivers and patients. Yet identifying and adopting these changes in a systematic and reproducible way is not an easy task—and, in many cases, is not part of the formal education of care providers. Chris Coburn, the chief innovation officer at Mass General Brigham, points out how important it is for current and prospective leaders to build skills in these areas to leverage new products and process technology to improve organizational efficiency and patient outcomes.

Following an Array of Innovations in Health Care

Coburn shares some examples of the types of innovations that health systems are embracing to maximize care across the entire spectrum of services. Leaders who stay on top of these and other trends also will be poised to adopt such meaningful changes and improvements in their organizations.

• Delivering hospital care at home. With growing awareness of the importance of delivering patient-centered care, many health systems are exploring the concept of providing hospital-level care to people in the comfort of their own homes. This model typically utilizes a mixture of remote and in-person offerings such as remote vital signs monitoring; intravenous medication administration; portable diagnostic testing, including advanced imaging and bloodwork, as needed; physical, occupational, and speech-language therapy sessions; social work support; and diet planning and food delivery. With workforce shortages and not enough in-patient hospital beds to meet the demand that exists, hospital-at-home offerings are expected to expand in the coming years and fill important gaps in medical systems. This approach provides an important way to increase patient access to care in a way that improves outcomes and reduces per-bed costs, Coburn says.
• Taking a page from retail experiences. While many health systems excel at delivering patient care in the hospital setting, Coburn suggests that they look to external partners to adapt some of their best practices to improve offerings for health care consumers. One such model can be working with retailers such as Best Buy, Instacart, CVS, and Walgreens, whose extensive expertise in serving customers can translate well to enhancing the delivery of health care services, technology, and products in a more consumer-centric way. For example, he explains that Best Buy operates a remote patient-monitoring platform that continuously transmits vital signs. It also serves as a virtual care conduit between patients receiving care at home and their clinical team. This has been a valuable component of Mass General Brigham’s home hospital offerings. Coburn points out that when health systems leverage consumer platforms, they can rely on the existing infrastructure to support the growth and scale of their home-based care delivery, freeing up their resources to focus more heavily on the quality of the clinical services provided.
• Utilizing machine learning and generative AI. The broad adoption of electronic health record technology has made data capture regarding hospital admissions, patient diagnoses, and outcomes more routine. Machine learning and AI make it possible to glean insights from these data sets to understand the needs of different populations, track the effectiveness of drugs, monitor patient health, predict outcomes, and use the findings to optimize treatment plans. Many health systems today are working with tech companies that have demonstrated expertise in AI to help them put the latest capabilities to work in exciting ways that save time and reduce costs. For instance, health systems can use generative AI (a type of AI that uses algorithms to create new content) and natural language processing to cull medical records and identify patients who could be at risk for rare conditions. AI can help clinicians predict what type of treatments will be most effective for different situations.
• Streamlining administrative processes. For instance, Mass General Brigham is testing the use of generative AI to produce a draft patient note immediately following a patient interview. In a pilot of this offering, natural language processing enables the notes to be structured to include links to key related information in the patient’s records, among other things. The note is then formatted for inclusion in the patient’s electronic health record. Such AI-based offerings can address a major source of clinician burnout by reducing administrative burden while improving the capture of relevant content. It’s important to mention that the recordings meet all patient privacy and confidentiality requirements.
• Advancing gene editing to improve outcomes for a range of diseases. “The focus on gene and cell therapy has been more of a promise than a reality until recently. But now, this approach has broken through in the treatment of some cancers and is also being advanced for neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune diseases, among others,” Coburn says. He adds that gene and cell therapy’s remarkable success in addressing and even curing some lethal cancers gives promise of game-changing results in other disease areas. Thus, a new chapter in care is beginning.
• Providing a more user-centric digital environment. Many health systems are beefing up their digital offerings to make them easier for health care consumers to use and navigate. The latest technologies can help organizations present content that is optimized to improve the patient experience by providing a more user-friendly approach and also improving communication. “At Mass General Brigham, we are committed to continuously looking for ways to ensure our digital offerings provide a high-quality and high-utility patient experience,” Coburn says.

Looking to the Future of Innovation

“This is just a fraction of the many innovations underway today that offer cause for real optimism for the future,” Coburn says, adding that clinician leaders and administrators should see themselves as potential innovators and work creatively to develop new approaches to improve their operations.

Since clinician leaders typically have a firsthand view of how things are done and the challenges faced, they are uniquely positioned to see new ways to bring about value-added change. Education can play an important role in providing physicians, nurses, industry leaders, and administrators with the training to embrace innovation and lead their organizations in this ever-changing marketplace. When leaders are well prepared in this area, they can inspire discovery-oriented staff to implement new technologies and systems for delivering breakthroughs that will ultimately benefit patients, staff, and the broader health care community.