This post is sponsored by the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation.
You can find some wonderful big-picture health care conferences out there, among them Health 2.0, covering web-based and mobile health care, and TEDMED, which offers a celebrity-rich lineup of scientific and medical innovators.
The Transform symposium, organized by the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation (CFI), is the only health care innovation conference deeply grounded in the daily workings of a major medical center — the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
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Now in its third year — the 2011 Transform conference is scheduled for Sept. 11-13 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota — the symposium in its first two years brought 62 speakers before some 900 attendees.
A willingness to thoughtfully consider perspectives from outside the health care mainstream — indeed to explicitly suggest that outlier viewpoints might one day help heal mainstream health care — is a hallmark of the Transform conference.
Among past Transform speakers have been Patch Adams, the famous clown doctor who runs a hospital where surgeons are paid the same as janitors ($300 a month); lawyers who sue drug companies holding monopolistic patents in Africa; a nurse in whose clinic patients weigh themselves and take other self-measurements; and the director of an urban clinic where physicians write prescriptions not just for drugs but also for food, housing, education and other supports for health.
The Transform symposium always features many of the marquee names whose work is to transform health care delivery in the U.S.
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Clayton M. Christensen, the Harvard business school professor, in 2009 described his theory of disruptive innovation, which has profoundly transformed the thinking and practice of countless physicians, administrators and health care workers.
Other speakers have included Tim Brown and Larry Keeley, who bring business innovation techniques to the health care sector (and who both advise Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation); the preventive medicine pioneer Dr. Dean Ornish; Jamie Heywood, the co-founder of the social networking health care web site PatientsLikeMe.com; and Frank Moss, the director of the MIT Media Lab and an innovator in life science technology.
As an incubator of innovation at Mayo Clinic, the Center for Innovation’s 50-member staff collaborates with Mayo departments seeking to improve patient services by redesigning workflow, teamwork, and other daily processes.
The Center for Innovation sponsors an annual contest awarding Mayo Clinic employees $50,000 grants to develop innovative medical technologies, a project that has yielded more than a dozen new medical devices.
The CFI’s most significant accomplishment may well be having demonstrated that design thinking — an innovation methodology widely used in business — can work in health care as well. The CFI’s designers, typically graduates of leading commercial design schools, lead their teams through a creative process that uses observation, planning and prototyping to create new products and services.
This year’s Transform conference promises a strong emphasis on the “design thinking in health care” theme. William Drenttel, the well-known graphic designer at the Winterhouse design firm, and an external advisor to the CFI, is helping the Center for Innovation develop the 2011 conference and to recruit speakers.
The Center for Innovation’s web site will post details as they are known.
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