Innovation has become a buzzword in healthcare. But how can organizations avoid getting stuck in pilot purgatory? And how can innovative thinking be brought to the oncology space?
Rebecca Kaul, vice president and chief innovation officer at Houston, Texas-based MD Anderson Cancer Center, shared her thoughts.
Kaul, who has been with MD Anderson for about two years, previously served as chief innovation officer and president of UPMC’s Technology Development Center, where she built their Innovation Center. She is a keynote speaker at the upcoming MedCity CONVERGE conference in Philadelphia.
What does your current role entail?
Chief innovation officer is an interesting role at all institutions, and it’s different at all institutions. At MD Anderson, we’re looking at innovation opportunities largely within digital health. I spend a lot of time looking at the startup community and also at big vendors. We also spend time with our internal folks talking about problems that need to be solved. It’s somewhat of a matchmaking exercise. We’re early in our inception here at MD Anderson in innovation.
What are the main differences between your previous CINO role at UPMC and your current CINO role?
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It depends on what time I was at UPMC. I started the UPMC Innovation Center, so I was employee number one. To compare where we were at year two at UPMC to where we are at year two at MD Anderson, it’s a similar model in that in the first couple years, you’re building capabilities and looking for low-hanging fruit areas to prove your value.
UPMC as an institution is more commercially focused and a different animal in terms of the types of projects you’d work on. At MD Anderson, we’re a huge research institution, a stand-alone cancer center and a different market. UPMC was the dominant provider [in the market], whereas MD Anderson has more of a national and international presence. One-third of our patients are local, one-third are national and one-third are international.
At MD Anderson, there’s a different kind of need to focus on. Rather than revenue-generating activities, it’s more focused on, “How do we transform care?” “How do we enable our research to get to the next level?”
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Why is oncology an area that’s ripe for innovation?
First of all, cancer is so prevalent. There are opportunities from prevention to care through survivorship. There’s sort of a continuum.
Before I came to MD Anderson, I thought about cancer as a death sentence, having lost my mother at a young age. Now it’s changed my perspective. If managed well, we can ultimately convert cancer to a chronic disease on the path to eliminating it. Shifting from cancer feeling like a terrible thing to something you manage is a really interesting opportunity.
How can organizations work to ensure that innovation translates to meaningful change?
I think what you’re talking about is the shiny object syndrome and the death by 1,000 pilots syndrome. People kind of chase cool ideas. They do these pilots and never see the light of day.
We’re very targeted in what we’re looking for. The first thing we do is identify a champion. If it’s not a problem to be solved at MD Anderson or I can’t find a champion, it’s just not going to be successful here. We look at anything as a piece of a roadmap, not just as a one-off thing to bring in and test. Startup companies can get lost in the bureacracy of these larger organizations, so we stay with them. If I’ve brought a company in, its success is a reflection of my success.
How can organizations integrate innovation into their culture?
A lot of people like the idea of innovation, and then they structure it off to the side. They say, “We need innovation.” Then they bring in a chief innovation officer and it’s a separate function.
Innovation needs to be core to everything you do. Institutions can bring that kind of thinking to seemingly non-innovative problems. Innovation doesn’t have to be sexy. It doesn’t have to be shiny and flashy.
What innovative projects and initiatives is MD Anderson working on?
As far as a specific project, we’ve been working with a company on optimizing our patient flow. They’re using machine learning to understand how patients have gone through our system, ultimately with the objective of reducing wait times for our patients. We’ve seen strong results so far. It started in our infusion areas, but we’re bringing it to other areas.
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