Health IT, Hospitals

How does MD Anderson Cancer Center choose and integrate new technology?

Speaking at the MedCity CONVERGE conference in Philadelphia this week, the MD Anderson Chief Innovation Officer observed that the most critical part of problem-solving is making sure you are addressing the right question to solve the right problem.

 

Rebecca Kaul MD Anderson Chief Innovation Officer, MedCity CONVERGE 2017

At the MedCity CONVERGE conference this week, Rebecca Kaul, MD Anderson Cancer Center Chief Innovation Officer offered an overview on a topic familiar to other providers and often mystifying to new healthcare startups — how does it decide on which new technologies to integrate and why?

Although she refrained from naming any vendors and wouldn’t go near the decision to end a collaboration with IBM Watson Health, she highlighted some of the factors that go into making these decisions.  For Kaul, it’s about the fundamentals that often get overlooked by keen entrepreneurs more eager to show why institutions should adopt their company’s technology than what the providers actually need.

“As someone who manages innovation, our job is to deliver value… I always ask myself what would be the value if I moved forward with this solution,” Kaul noted in the question and answer session of her talk. “If I can’t see it, I don’t move forward with it.”

“Make sure you are solving the right problem” was a point she made repeatedly — at times sounding like a Buddhist meditation mantra. The point, Kaul noted, is that by spending much of your time focusing on “the right problem”, it makes the task of finding the most suitable technology that much easier.

One important step, especially for entrepreneurs, is finding a champion for their product or service within the organization. Those champions can help make the company’s case by evangelizing a vendor’s technology, particularly if they’re a doctor. Without that buy in, it will be a lot tougher to convince others, Kaul observed.

She illustrated the technology adoption process with a problem brought to her attention at MD Anderson — if they are going to cut long wait times at the cancer center, they need to add more space and more beds.  Kaul noted that if the center solved that problem, it would have to add more staff to accommodate the increase in patients and that wasn’t necessarily a practical option.

“We changed the question to ‘How do we increase patient satisfaction and decrease wait times?'”

The institution focused on when patients were initially contacted for an appointment and how to make this process more efficient. It also looked at the patient experience with different touch points across the cancer center, not just one department. Kaul said they came up with 60 recommendations.

The group invested in a Silicon Valley startup that optimizes patient flow using machine learning and schedule patients for appointments in a way that reduces “dead space” from the workflow. Kaul noted that one surprising outcome from the new vendor was that the cancer center was able to reduce its hours of operation.

Asked about competition with other institutions when it comes to health IT vendors, Kaul noted that she and her colleagues often share insights about startups and health IT vendors with other health systems on a Slack channel it started.

“We share pipelines and we share our experiences with startups and vendors. It’s a collaborative exchange.”

Photo: Justin Lawrence

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