Several years ago the great Naomi Fried solved a problem at Boston Children’s Hospital. Her team created a system in which rank-and-file employees could submit unique, innovative ideas for funding consideration at the hospital.
These weren’t scalable startups, necessarily. Instead, they were enterprising concepts employees thought could make Boston Children’s better. Fried’s project was prescient and by all public accounts added a new, positive dimension to the hospital.
It’s time to take the same approach with patients. Health systems should create patient innovation committees, which would consider patients’ ideas to improve care and, when deemed worthy, run with them. Patients are smarter by the second, increasingly attuned to the issues in healthcare, and their valuable insights are lost if we don’t capture them before they heal and move on.
The idea hit me as I listened to MedCity ENGAGE keynote speaker Kezia Fitzgerald, the patient-turned-entrepreneur who launched her CareAline, which creates a wrap to protect feeding tubes, central lines and other similar products.
Fitzgerald’s first wrap was essentially jerryrigged to help her 11-month-old daughter keep her tube clean as she fought a valiant but, sadly, losing battle with cancer.
So many patients with long-term illnesses get to know the health system and how their diseases are managed as well as doctors, nurses and administrators. The catch: they see medicine from a more intimate and fresh perspective.
Fitzgerald is unique but not alone. At MedCity ENGAGE, I also met Grace Collins, who has spent years working on Telecaregiver, a business providing 40 hours of training in telemedicine specifically for certified nurses assistants. The business was inspired from years of caring for her mother and father, who had a range of illnesses from Alzheimers to heart problems.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“I had 19 nurses,” Collins said. “Sixteen of them were bad.”
Why can’t we tap into that energy and insights to make more CareAlines and Telecaregivers within healthcare?
Hospitals already have patient committees: Johns Hopkins, Cleveland’s University Hospitals and Michigan’s Spectrum Health are just a few examples. Sometimes, these groups have in their mandate to find “creative and cost-effective solutions to problems.”
Tangibly, though, the focus of these committees are on training and patient experience metrics. The Executive Patient and Family Advisory Council at Spectrum, for example, helped residents prepare for patient experience, reviewed telehealth applications, improved wayfinding and addressed communication issues.
That’s extremely valuable. But patients can do more.
A Patients Committee on Innovation wouldn’t be made up of patients, necessarily, but perhaps members of a hospital’s innovation or tech transfer team. The committee would review patient ideas in the tradition of Fried’s Boston Children’s project. Great projects would get seed money and a chance to grow.
If they scale, patients receive some compensation and the hospitals that foster the projects get two competitive advantages: new products no one else has and the realization they’re listening to their customers in a way no one else is.
