Another Day, Another App, Another Satisfied Customer

How might health care providers use technology to turn customers' mobile phones into information displays and ordering devices? A few years ago, the NY Times outlined how retailers are doing it...

"(Designer Norma) Kamali is at the forefront of a technological transformation coming to many of the nation’s retailers. They are determined to strengthen the link between their physical stores and the Web, and to use technology to make shopping easier for consumers and more lucrative for themselves.
...

Cisco Systems, the supplier of networking equipment and services for the Internet, is also a leader in the field. The company’s Mobile Concierge system is capable of connecting customers’ smartphones to retailers’ wireless networks — so a shopper could type “Cheez Whiz” into a cellphone, then pinpoint its location in the store."

Ms. Kamali's boutique installed a technology called ScanLife, "allowing people to scan bar codes on merchandise and obtain details about the clothes through video."

Potential health care applications? Let's see. It could go like this...

Perhaps cancellations and other snafus are making it difficult for your CT department to maintain a full schedule. Time is money as the hum of an empty scanner proves. Encourage patients needing a CT scan - those with flexible schedules - to download an app announcing their willingness to respond to a "We've just had a cancellation. Can you be here in 10 minutes?" message.

Now the patient arrives, lost and disoriented from the long trip in from the parking garage. Where am I? Good question. Waving her phone in front of a bar-coded icon on the wall sends a map and location to her phone.

Now the PATIENT knows where she is. You might also benefit from knowing.  And of course your CT department is also interested in smoother workflow and improved customer service, so...

Create an app to give the department a 10-minute "heads-up" prior to the patient's arrival. Patients who sign up and download the app can be detected as soon as they set foot in the hospital. Their paperwork is ready before they walk in the department's door. They're greeted by name.

What if she gets lost on her way to CT? Create an app that recognizes her current location in the facility and delivers turn-by-turn directions on her phone. Sort of a private-label, in-house MapQuest.

Need to deliver just-in-time teaching information or post-procedure instructions? Scan the appropriate procedure or diagnosis bar code and download a short teaching video to her phone.

You know when the patient arrived, now use that same app to track when she leaves, generating "time-in-the-door to time-out-the-door" data as important additions to your productivity and patient satisfaction metrics.

Once the system flags the patient's departure, send an alert to the referring physician saying something like "Thanks for your referral. Your report will be ready in 30 minutes."

As a thank-you to the patient for keeping your schedule full, send her a real-time electronic coupon for a free latte at your in-lobby Starbucks. The bar code allows for instant redemption and tracking.

Your patient needs reminders for follow-up visits, vaccinations, mammograms, cancer screenings? Apps, apps and more apps.

And of course nothing in a hospital would be complete without a committee to discuss it all. Wondering if this conference room is available for an impromptu meeting and for how long? Point your phone at the room number and and the embedded bar code will tell you.

And so ends another day at "Point & Click Hospital."

Developers include Cisco Systems with its Mobile Concierge system and I.B.M with a product called Presence.

The Sam's Club division of Wal-Mart, Crate & Barrel, Kerr Drug and Disney stores are among the retailers deploying mobile technology, with major roll-outs starting as far back as 2011.

11:46 AM

Disrupting Healthcare - 2013's Best

From Leah Binder in Forbes: "The Best Disruptive Writings Of 2013 -- Health Care Edition"

From Helen Bevan: Rocking healthcare's boat while staying in it: how to succeed as a radical in healthcare.

6:49 AM

How Do Innovations Spread?

From Atul Gawande, writing in the New Yorker:

In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.

But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process. (emphasis mine)

Read the entire article, here.

7:55 AM

Rock Health: "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Hospital Partnerships"

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Hospital Partnerships by @Rock_Health from Rock Health

7:52 AM

The Patients Speak!

Andrea J. Simon writing at HospitalImpact.org:  "What Do Patients Really Want and Do Docs Care?"

With high deductibles, consumers all expressed how they are less likely to go to the doctor unless they are really sick. A number of them spoke about preempting the healthcare system altogether and instead, using their personal network to speak with friends who are nurses about their situation or that of their child before going to the physicians.

Most interesting was the degree to which these consumers--all of whom were between 25 and 54 in age--were anxious to get mobile applications that they could use themselves to help diagnose and manage their conditions. DIY healthcare is going to be very hot if we can get it right.

11:50 AM

10 Ways to Stay On Top Of the Innovation Heap

The authors of Booz & Company's "Global Innovation 1,000 Report" offer their Top 10 things innovative companies do right (via Business Insider.com)

1. At innovative companies, everybody is an innovator.
2. Innovative companies measure their idea-generation success.
3. Innovative companies change the idea a lot before it becomes a product.
4. Innovative companies test their idea with customers.
5. Innovative companies have an internal "idea czar."
6. Innovative companies talk to customers and other partners.
7. Innovative companies find ideas everywhere.
8. Innovative companies generate ideas in three basic ways:
1. Need seekers: what do customers want?
2. Market readers: quickly create improvements on market trends.
3. Technology drivers: letting their tech experts experiment.
9. Innovative companies spend R&D money thoughtfully, not profligately.
10. Innovative companies systematically create new ideas.

Though healthcare (big pharma, mostly) is heavily represented, healthcare providers are not.   Not unexpectedly, few of these 10 activities play to providers' strengths or fit naturally into a typical hospital culture.  Outside of a few organizations like Cleveland Clinic, there's a lot more innovation 'talking' than innovation 'doing.'  Maybe it's the first step in a journey of recovery - admitting you have a problem, er, opportunity.

Read the entire article, here.

8:14 AM

Tensions In Innovation, 2013

Forbes:  "...it’s hard not to worry that if medicine goes in the direction of the Cheesecake Factory, where care is administered on the cheap by customer-service technologists plugging data into an algorithm, then an ancient and noble profession will face extinction because of an inability (some might say a haughty unwillingness) to adequately contemplate and communicate its essential value proposition." 

1:33 PM

Innovating Education In Chicago

Interesting summary of the innovators and incubators reforming education in Chicago: Smart Cities: Chicago's Collaborative and Chaotic Reform Record

"For over a generation, Chicago has served as the epicenter of for-profit, technology-enabled education entrepreneurship and investment."

"According to Patrick Haugh, The Chicago Public Education Fund, "Chicago sports not only an impressive set of ed investors (Sterling, GSV Advisors), established industry leaders, and an emerging cohort of promising edtech startups, it also possesses a vital network of innovative ed organizations with great local leadership, and creative funders."

Understatement of the waning year:  "...Chicago kids would benefit from coherent state policies aimed at equity, options, and innovation." 

9:59 AM

Steve Jobs On Process Vs. Innovation

“The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.
“But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
“And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important." [BusinessWeek, Oct. 12, 2004]

7:32 AM

"These Aren't Your Typical Loos..."

From Seattlepi.com:

"These aren't your typical loos. One uses microwave energy to transform human waste into electricity. Another captures urine and uses it for flushing. And still another turns excrement into charcoal."

Read more, here.

2:00 PM

"Enterprise IT has plenty of room for improvement..."

"Rogue IT" is about to wreak havoc at work" is Fortune's headline.  Not a moment too soon, I might add. 
From the article:

"Rogue IT is the name given to the informal, ad hoc software and devices brought by employees into the workplace. If you've ever taken your own iPad to work or used cloud-based software like Evernote or Dropbox in the office, you may well be an offender. And you're not alone. Some 43% of businesses report that their employees are using cloud services independently of the IT department, according to a recent survey of 500 IT decision makers.

"In the past, these enterprise software and hardware decisions were often the exclusive domain of a company's chief information officer or CIO, the senior executive in charge of information technology and computer systems. "Sitting in his high chair in a grey suit barking orders, [the CIO would make] product decisions for big companies with even larger user bases," explains Peter Fenton of tech investors Benchmark Capital. Rogue IT turns that model on its head, effectively crowdsourcing IT choices to employees. So where does this leave the venerable CIO? And what does it mean for the future of IT at the world's largest enterprises?

"The good news is that enterprise IT has plenty of room for improvement. "[Traditional IT] carries connotations of interminable rollouts, bewildering interfaces, obscure functionality and high prices," writes CIO.com's Bernard Golden. Security, compliance and back-end compatibility have traditionally topped CIO wish lists, not usability. As a result, employees have sometimes been left with programs that are anything but intuitive. This exacted a heavy toll in terms of time, money and organizational well-being.

[...]

"Bloated, enterprise software no longer cuts it. Seduced by Facebook (FB) and similarly intuitive platforms at home, millennials balk at staring down monster spreadsheets or decoding web 1.0 UIs at work, writes Fast Company contributor Marcia Conner. Increasingly, they expect their work suites and software to be just as user-friendly as the apps they know and love in their personal lives, a trend known as the consumerization of IT. And they're willing to go outside company walls to find products that work best for them."

So do we still need a CIO?  Apparently we do, but with employees and customers doing the heavy lifting, voting with their feet (to mix a bunch of metaphors,) the CIO will finally have time for the big, important, profitable stuff.  OK.

But if you think it's just your employees (and maybe a few physicians) going rogue, well, your customers went over that wall a long time ago.  You probably didn't notice or care until that first iPad appeared in your waiting room.


Read the whole thing, here.

And, here, from HootSource, HootSuite's blog.

6:58 AM

Health Systems Have Been Slow To Innovate...

And Canada's 'My Healthcare Innovation' hopes to bend the innovation curve upward.

"My Healthcare Innovation is a spin-off of the Innovation Cell, a non-profit think tank at the University of Toronto. Incubated since 2009, MHI is a private and secure global platform configured specifically for healthcare workers to more effectively collaborate and share timely, locally relevant solutions. "

[...]

"Health systems have been very slow to innovate and we under-realize our return from our investment in medical research and human resources. What we need is a health system that can distill and articulate its high priority problems, share them to the innovation community (internally and externally), reward innovators and facilitate rapid implementation of "disruptive" technologies. HTX is interested in My Healthcare Innovation as a way of creating and interconnecting communities of interest to share problems and best practices, while maintaining a safe and secure environment for frank discussion," said John Soloninka, CEO of the Health Technology Exchange.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/480752#ixzz1dDb9P7CH

7:52 AM

Tracking Afib On Your iPhone

From Dr. Westby G. Fisher, writing at MedCity News:  "Patient illustrates how the iPhone and $1.99 could disrupt the medical device industry."

"Today in my clinic, a patient brought me her atrial fibrillation burden history on her iPhone and it cost her less than a $10 co-pay. For $1.99 US, she downloaded the iPhone app Cardiograph to her iPhone.

[...]

"I got a relative picture of how often she was having afib and she got the opportunity to help me with her care.

"Was this a medical device? No, it was an iPhone app. Was it perfect? No it wasn’t. I certainly couldn’t differentiate frequent PAC’s or PVC’s from atrial fibrillation reliably. It was NOT an EKG after all. But we were past that point in her evaluation. I just needed to know how often she was having her known paroxysmal atrial fibrillation and she wanted to keep a convenient record of her episodes.

"Was it helpful in this case? Absolutely.

"More importantly, she just saved herself and the health care system a ton of money. "

10:09 AM

Healthcare's Biggest Problem Is...

...too much money.  Wait.  What?

Interesting opinion yesterday from the blogosphere, that healthcare's biggest problem is too much money.  Too many resources, leading to too many people, too much time spent deliberating and too few imperatives toward action.

That's why, in our best leisurely fashion, we approve capital budgets just once a year.  Miss the cycle and it's 'wait 'til next year.'  And that's OK; it's not like it's life & death or anything.

Making the cycle, especially in IT, means launching RFP processes lasting another year and pilot projects lasting one more.  And system-wide rollouts lasting two more...assuming everything goes as planned, which it seldom does.  (Can you count to five?)

That's why off-the-shelf solutions costing 'a little' are rejected in favor of customized (yet corporate-approved) offerings costing twice as much and taking thrice as long.

That's why $8.99 iPhone apps are pooh-poohed as "not serious" and "risky" while the entry-level price for "real" software seemingly starts at $250k, rising rapidly after that.  (Ask me sometime about Voxie vs. the IT geeks.)

That's why our systems for cancer care are confusing messes yet our answer is to add yet another layer of staffing and expense - "Nurse Navigators" they're called.  I guess we'll start on that whole cost reduction and process simplification thing sometime tomorrow. 

And so we have armies of bureaucrats and analysts and process sponsors, technicians, project managers, coordinators and specialists.  We need them all to churn the system...and still we think of ourselves as understaffed.

And thus committees proliferate, PowerPoint becomes the organization's lingua franca, and, typically, the "back of the house" systems (Finance, IT, HR) are far more modern than "front of the house," customer-facing offerings.  When did YOU start offering patients an on-line portal and how many revenue cycle systems came and went before the portal's go-live?

Take away that money, most of the people and all of the committees.  Remove the luxury of time.  What's left? A startup mentality where cheap is better than expensive and free is best of all.  Where costs avoided mean making payroll...or not.  Where new customers this afternoon are better than impressive forecasts two years out.  Where a bias to action always trumps endless discussion.

What's Out: big checks to license Microsoft's crappy software (oops, is my bias showing?)  What's In: free Google apps.

What's Out: elaborate performance monitoring and benchmarking systems.  What's in: free daily tracking from iDoneThis.

Money gives you the luxury of time and lessens the pressure of deliberation.  That's not always a good thing.  And it's why a million little, ankle-biting startups are about to eat hospitals for lunch.  I'm just sayin.'

UPDATE:  Don't believe me?  Read "What We Can Learn From Third-World Health Care" by Pauline W. Chen, M.D., writing in the New York Times:

"The key to their success is an unabashed disregard for some of our most cherished assumptions about what constitutes good care. Instead of providing antibiotics, CT scans and high-tech interventions, Partners in Health considers basic necessities like food and housing as critical components of the group’s medical work. Instead of asking patients to travel miles to the only clinic and see only the doctor or nurse, they train cadres of community health workers who can monitor, administer and advise in the heart of local villages and in people’s homes.

"Applied to organizations in the United States, this approach has proved startlingly effective, as the Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment, or PACT, program has demonstrated. PACT targets some of the poorest and sickest patients with H.I.V. and other chronic illnesses in the greater Boston area. Just like Partners in Health, PACT relies extensively on community health workers who are trained in tasks like helping patients take their medications and make it to clinic appointments as well as reviewing their pantries and teaching them to prepare healthy meals. Applying these broad definitions of care, PACT has significantly decreased the number of emergency room visits and life-threatening opportunistic infections, cut hospitalization rates by 60 percent and yielded a 16 percent savings for Medicaid."

8:21 AM

Graying America Gets Wired

...healthcare costs get slashed. Who says old folks don't use computers? From Reuters: "Graying America gets wired to cut healthcare costs"

...Marilyn Yeats, 79, is suffering from congestive heart failure and uses a personal healthcare computer, Connect, provided by the health insurer Humana Corp. She calls it My Little Nurse for helping her keep track of her blood pressure, weight, temperature and whether she is taking her medicines on time.

"It rings me up every morning at 10 am, and there I am, on my machine measuring myself, and if I have gained weight, it asks me additional questions. I say it is like having your own nurse come into your house every day." said the Naples, Fla., resident.

If these programs succeed, home technologies could help slash billions of dollars from the nation's $2.6 trillion healthcare bill by keeping elderly people in their homes for longer and out of expensive hospitals and nursing homes.

Again, pay attention to the growing number of ideas (and funding) devoted to the idea that a hospital admission is a process FAILURE somewhere else in the system. Those ideas and all that venture capital are targeted squarely at hospitals' threadbare business model.

It's a trend that can't be stopped (and shouldn't be if we're hoping to avoid national  bankruptcy.) The only question, really, is when we'll stop saying "Old folks don't use computers..." and say instead "Old folks are like the rest of us in using what adds value to their lives."

And if we view them as computer-phobic Luddites, well, shame on us for lacking the vision and innovative drive to deliver value to those who need it most.

2:54 PM

Healthcare CEO's Guide to Avoiding the Newspaper Industry's Mistakes

Imagine an industry, slow-moving, comfortable and secure in assuming its own irreplaceability.  Health care?  Well, yes,  But also newspapers, and therein lies a lesson or two.

From Forbes here's the Healthcare CEO's Guide to Avoiding Newspaper Industry Mistakes: (note that the underlined emphases are mine.)

"Health system CEOs would be well advised to study what newspaper industry leaders did (or perhaps more appropriately, didn’t do) when faced with a dramatic industry change. Turn back the clock 15 years and the following dynamics were present:

• Newspaper leaders knew full well that dramatic change was underway and even made some tactical investments. However they didn’t fundamentally rethink their model.
• Newspapers were comfortable as monopoly or oligopoly businesses allowing for plodding decisions. Their IT infrastructure mirrored the plodding pace with expensive and rigid technology architectures.
• Newspaper companies bought up other newspaper chains and took on huge debt.
• Owning printing presses was a de facto barrier to entry allowing newspapers unfettered dominance.
• Depending on one’s perspective, it was the best of times or the worst of times to be a leader of local media enterprise.

"Before they knew it, owning massive capital assets and the accompanying crushing debt became unsustainable. The capital barrier to entry transformed into a boat anchor while nimble competition dismissed as ankle-biters created a death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts dynamic. Competitively, newspaper companies worried only about other media companies or even Microsoft, but their undoing was driven by a combination of craigslist, monster.com, cars.com, eBay, and countless other marketing substitutes for their advertisers. In addition, there were easier ways to get news than newspapers. Generally, the newspaper’s digital groups were either marginalized or unbearably shackled so that the encumbered digital leaders left to join more aggressive competitors. The enabling technology to reinvent local media didn’t come from legacy IT vendors who’d long sold to newspaper companies, but from “no name” technologies such as WordPress, Drupal and the like.
"The parallels with health systems today are clear. Consider the present dynamics:

• Health systems have been aggressively gobbling up other healthcare providers and frequently taking on debt to finance the growth. Concurrently, health systems often have capital project plans that equal their annual revenues even though no expert believes the answer to healthcare’s hyperinflation is building more buildings. Consider the duplicative $430 million being spent in San Diego to build two identical facilities just a few miles apart as Exhibit A of the problem. Studying other countries that shifted from a “sick care” to a “health care” system, more than half of their hospitals closed. They simply weren’t needed or weren’t appropriate.
• Until recently, complex medical procedures always took place in an acute care hospital setting. Increasingly they are being done more and more in specialty facilities that can do a high volume of particular procedures at a signifiantly lower cost.
• Just as newspapers were implementing multimillion dollar IT systems while nimble competitors were using low and no cost software to disrupt the local media landscape, health systems are similarly implementing complex systems to automate the complexity necessary in a multi-faceted system. Meanwhile, disruptive innovators are implementing new models at a fraction of the cost and time. For example, it’s well understood that a healthy primary care system is the key to increasing the health of a population. Imagine if a fraction of the billions being spent by mission-driven, non-profit health systems on automating complexity was redirected towards the reinvigoration of primary care. They’d further their mission and lower their costs. Of course, they’d likely see revenues drop but presumably maximizing revenues isn’t the mission of a non-profit.
• The plodding pace and scale of innovation at most health systems isn’t up to the enormity of the task. The vast majority of health system innovation teams are constrained by how they have to fit innovation into an existing infrastructure. That approach rarely, if ever, leads to breakthroughs, as its true intent is to make tweaks to a current system rather than a rethink from the ground up.

Great article, one that should be required reading for every hospital CEO, board member and executive team.  The rest of you innovators and disrupters needn't bother.

7:23 AM

Ford seeks to develop "the car that cares."

From PhysOrg.com:  Ford, Microsoft Corp. and Healthrageous are researching how connected devices can help people monitor and maintain health and wellness.
"According to a study conducted by Pew Research:

• 93 percent said they seek out online health information because it's convenient - they want to get information on their own timetable, not the doctor's.
• 83 percent said it's because they can get more information from the Web than they can get from their own doctor.
• 80 percent said getting this information privately is important to them.

"As people spend more time in their cars, the ability to manage health and wellness on the go becomes more important. There are several reasons why the automobile is an ideal platform for research and development in this area:

• It's convenient and private.
• It facilitates personalized access to the information, products and services people need.
• And it's a logical place for them to manage their health while they are more often stuck in traffic.

"The goal is to figure out how to extend health management into the personal vehicle in a nonintrusive fashion. The prototype system was designed by BlueMetal Architects."

[Read more...]

.

3:13 PM

Doctors vs. Algorithms?

Do We Need Doctors or Algorithms, asks Vinod Khosla.  The answer may surprise those of you spending your days worrying about an impending physician shortage.

"Eventually, we won’t need the average doctor and will have much better and cheaper care for 90-99% of our medical needs. We will still need to leverage the top 10 or 20% of doctors (at least for the next two decades) to help that bionic software get better at diagnosis. So a world mostly without doctors (at least average ones) is not only not reasonable, but also more likely than not. There will be exceptions, and plenty of stories around these exceptions, but what I am talking about will most likely be the rule and doctors may be the exception rather than the other way around.

...

"What is important to realize is how medical education and the medical profession will change toward the better as a result of these trends. The vision I am proposing here, though, is one in which those decades of learning and experience are used where they actually matter. We consider doctors some of the most learned people in our society. We should aim to use their time and knowledge in the most efficient manner possible. And everybody should have access to the skills of the very best ones instead of only having access to the average doctor. And the not so “Dr. House’ doctors will help us with better patient skills, bedside manners, empathy, advice and caring, and they will have more time for that too. If computers can drive cars and deal with all the knowledge in jeopardy, surely their next to next to next…generation can do diagnosis, treatment and teaching in these far less uncertain domains and with a lot more data. Further the equalizing impact of both electronic doctors and teaching environments has hugely positive social implications. Besides, who wants to be treated by an “average” doctor? And who does not want to be an empowered patient?"

In just a few paragraphs, Khosla defines healthcare's future. Though I happen to agree, what I find somewhat depressing is that hospitals will sit, wait and have it done TO them, missing out entirely on the future's new, exciting value streams. Missing the opportunity to participate, to benefit and to re-envision the hospital as something beyond a massive, expensive and now-empty acute care cathedral.

Because if algorithms replace doctors, will doctors (and patients) still need hospitals?   Read the whole thing.

7:19 AM

Which Patients Will Disengage From Treatment?

Presented at AHRQ and termed a "stunning innovation in health care," Mind Field Solutions' iPhone/iPad app diagnoses which patients will disengage from treatment.  The new approach also provides a neuroscientific explanation of the underlying causes behind patient disengagement.

Says neuroscientist, Dr. Andrea LaFountain, CEO and Founder of Mind Field Solutions:

"We are excited about the potential that this innovation brings to healthcare delivery, outcomes and cost. Healthcare has suffered greatly due to the inability to effectively and efficiently engage patients in their self-care. This research provides a scientific framework for engagement that creates significant impact in outcomes and cost. Our data suggests a cost savings of $3billion per annum for Medicare diabetes alone,"

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/06/4167823/mind-field-solutions-presents.html##storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/06/4167823/mind-field-solutions-presents.html##storylink=cpy

 

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/06/4167823/mind-field-solutions-presents.html##storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/06/4167823/mind-field-solutions-presents.html##storylink=cpy

1:48 PM

Job: President-Center for Healthcare Innovation

Responsibilities: The Allina Health System is committed to building a nationally recognized center for healthcare research and innovation positioned to advance patient care and health in our community. This position provides overall strategic and operational leadership to The Center for Healthcare Research and Innovation (The Center).

Most research conducted at Allina will be coordinated by The Center, but the emphasis will be on new research targeted at the advancement of the patient care model, epidemiology, shared decision making, the management of total cost of care, and the optimization of the health of populations. This position will ensure that The Center will serve as a catalyst for developing innovative approaches to care – within Allina, in the community, and across the industry – which deliver greater value for stakeholders.

The incumbent will lead the support of innovative projects that will:

• Advance our patient care model with emphasis on prevention, chronic disease management, end of life care and the patient care continuum.
• Improve the health of the community through collaborative approaches with other community stakeholders and with an eye towards improved health of populations.
• Support the development of innovative medical therapies and treatments.
• Pursue partnerships to provide opportunities for learning and sharing of innovations.
• Build a comprehensive and integrated approach to clinical research.
• Advance a fund development strategy to support The Center’s work.

Qualifications (Education/Experience)

• MD preferred, will consider PhD, MBA, MPH, MHA, JD, or related healthcare master’s degree.

• 5-7 years experience in research arena with emphasis on public health, care model design, health services, population health, epidemiology, and progressive grant funded research (e.g. NIH, AHRQ, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation).

• 5-7 years progressively responsible experiences leading operational research.

Apply online
http://tinyurl.com/77fszfu

The fine print: I post interesting healthcare-related job opportunities as they come to my attention. These are not my searches. I am not a recruiter and have no stake, financial or otherwise, in filling the position, just a hope that, in some small way, I can assist you, dear reader, in finding your dream opportunity. 

Connect with me on Linkedin, here.

8:16 AM