(A previous series available on SoundCloud) Welcome to Health Pilots, where we interview people pursuing new solutions for health care in low-income communities. You’ll hear about new technologies and workflows, human-centered design, and how to collaboratively innovate. We talk with Katherine Lancman, a partner in Raw Innovation who has deep experience working with health focused companies that are looking to develop new ideas that deliver better health outcomes for their customers and cost reduction for the system. She is excited about health because the accessibility of technology and more customizable care options are rapidly changing the landscape.
In this episode, Chris and Katherine cover:
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Share a little bit about yourself and how you got started on your journey and ended up in San Francisco?
I m an innovation professional with healthcare focus. My career started 12 years ago as a marketer; I started psychology in marketing which lead me to have a love of people. I worked through being a researcher and ended heading up my own innovation department. After that I started consulting into businesses; help organizations get innovation happening. For the past 4 years I ve really focused on healthcare organizations, like pharmaceutical companies and insurers, working to help people be healthier and live a better quality of life.
What made the trip from Australia to the US?
My husband is an anesthesiologist and he did his training in Australia. He is a patient safety specialist and wanted to come to the US to work with some of the specialists while doing a trauma internship at the San Francisco General Hospital.
Why is innovation needed in healthcare and what is the essence of the opportunity?
The way care is being delivered is changing and evolving. The local healthcare is being seen as a portal that is withholding information and results. It s an evolving model and we really need to understand the patient, their needs, and deliver solutions that can help them be healthier. Helping the patients have more control in their health and then allowing them to have more information, but good quality information; giving them information that is relevant to them in that point in time.
Do you work everything from protocols and structure as well as technology?
We work right across the healthcare space. Raw Innovation, the company I ve worked for for the last three years uses a human centered design process. It s about working with the patient and understanding exactly what that patient needs. Ideas about services, ideas about technology, ideas about ways the patient can interact with a healthcare professional, what I m seeing is the number of tech ideas is outnumbering the number of other ideas. We re definitely seeing that more technology is needed for patients.
Can you share a few examples of innovation healthcare that you re familiar with and that you ve seen that you re excited about?
There s so many of them. One of them that I m excited about is called LARK. It is essentially a nutrition buddy in your pocket. The reason I love LARK is because I have a psych back ground and I love the error of study around neuro economics, which is helping people understand that we re not perfect when we make decisions and anytime that we make a decision there s a tradeoff going on at the same time.
As you re making decisions during the day, LARK is there to help and chat, give you advice, and feed you information. It is built off the advice of some of the top end doctors and nutritionists out of Stanford. It s like the world s best advice in your pocket and they base it on best practice guidelines for diabetes and obesity and they have modules that work with it, too.
I think the chances and the ability of something like LARK being in your pocket all the time to chat with you about decisions you re making is incredible. For someone with diabetes or someone with a heart issue, it has the potential to start detecting changes in patient groups or people and help them access healthcare professionals before they get to a serious point and might need to go to Emergency.
The more we can detect people in the community, the more we can help them be healthier and have better outcomes and the more we can help the system contain its cost.
It sounds like it s a patient-centered solution; does it integrate with the healthcare provider?
Currently, it s self-managed, it s on the HealthKit. It picks up all your information from your blood monitors, or glucose monitors, things like heart rate devices because it s built on healthcare it will pick all of those things up and HealthKit is linked with EPIC these days so that information can get through.
For those that are unfamiliar with HealthKit, can you say a little bit more about that?
I m not hugely in-the-know myself, but HealthKit is an Apple platform that has been designed to help developers develop new and different health platforms. On the Apple Watch or the iPhone it integrates data, and HealthKit has collaborated with EPIC, EPIC is one of the biggest health platforms in America which helps the data from HealthKit go through to the patient files on EPIC. Essentially, data from the phone can go through to the patient records.
They ve created an amazing platform which makes it much easier to connect devices.
It s something that is happening as we speak and it s very new, but it s making very fast progress because Apple has made a commitment to healthcare and making an impact on a number of things like diabetes, autism, and some other chronic health conditions.
HealthKits ability to take the date from the devices and put them into accessibility of the healthcare professionals is really going to be a game changer.
The other thing they re doing is the importance of data and collecting it and seeing population level information so you can do much better interpretation.
You can always make better decisions with more data. There s a challenge now with how to make it accessible, because it can also be overwhelming, but I think something like LARK that has so much data in the background of the system and how it s working. What they ve done is make it understandable, and digestible, and practical to help a person with a phone make better decisions on what they re eating and the exercise they re doing.
Let s talking about innovating in a safety-net, per se. Is it possible to do so even though there s resource constraints?
Yes, you can always innovate. Working in non-profits, there is ways to innovate and it s just about being clever.
Australia is quite a bit different than the US, we don t have a safety-net, per se, but what we are seeing is philanthropy organizations spending a lot of money in mental health, preventative health, and programs to help disadvantaged communities have better outcomes.
One of the things we often do is help non-profits work with companies in that area and work out ways that they could work better together. An organization that doesn t have a big cost base to innovate can leverage off some skills and capabilities in a business that wants to help the communities.
Pharmaceutical companies are often great companies that want to do things outside of what they do, so they re often quite keen to engage with not-for-profit and see how they can work with communities to get better health outcomes.
In addition, I always say that all you really need is skills to innovate and some paper. At the end of the day if you can teach a team how to ask questions and how to have an idea and then how to get from a piece of paper through to getting that idea happening that s what you need to have innovation happening in an organization without having huge costs. It does need perseverance and energy and enthusiasm and people.
Mental health and the difference in physical health; it s stigmatized, we think about it very differently. A simple innovation that we re starting to see in a number of organizations is bringing mental health specialists and behavioral health professionals into a clinic so they can treat patients more holistically.
It s crazy to me because if you look at the world health care organizations definition of health and it s mental and physical well-being of an individual not just the non-existence of infirmary there. It s kind of like a world where they are set up different, but they are very much together. I think that s one of the big transition points that we need to get to.
It s not a separate professional that needs to be involved in mental health issues, it s if it s mental health issues involved with having cancer it s that doctor that needs to have linkages into whatever care they re getting in the mental health issues. The more programs we have that are actually starting to link that continuity of care to get that together, the better patient outcomes will have.
I can t count how many times I ve heard the lack of support around the mental health side of what they re going through from the clinicians. Not that they didn t care about them, but instead of taking care of them, they are being referred to others. The patients want more. They want more feeling of togetherness and a care team that is caring holistically about them.
In general, what makes innovation challenging for any organization?
I often like to talk about 5 barriers to innovation, I have a little acronym: B.A.S.E.S. B stands for behaviors. Innovation is completely lead by behavior. And there are four key innovative behaviors that I like to foster. One is the explorer, and that s about exploring the challenges, exploring the people, the patients, the doctors, the nurses, everyone around the challenge and getting in there and uncovering some interesting things.
The second innovative behavior is creativity, being free to have ideas without judgment.
The third innovation behavior is the judge; it does have its place, but we need to make sure it s very contained into one part of the process. It s how we are taught to be. As part of innovation we have to say, that has its place, we have to judge the ideas, but we need to judge them in one place and one place only. And we need to stop judging the rest of the process.
The final behavior is the warrior, and the warrior is the most critical behavior of all because it s about, you go out there, you ve got your tools, you re going to do battle with this idea and get it through the organization, and you will get knocked down. People will try to sway you a different way, but you have to be the warrior and know that you re going the right way because you have the evidence to back you up.
The second A in B.A.S.E.S. is about attitude, which is all about the saying, If you think you can or if you think you can t, you re probably right. It s important to get everyone on the team to believe that they can.
The S is skills. I go into a lot of organizations and they tell me they have a lot of ideas but none of them work. I will ask them how they went about setting the challenge and if they ve looked at an innovation process and how they set the challenge and they realize that they really haven t went through the process of exploring the issues. So the first thing we can do is teach the team some skills. Once they know the process they will come up with much better ideas.
The E is environment and I always say that if you always have the same meeting room, and the same conversations, just doing that one switch up can offer new inspiration.
The final S is structures and processes. If you have 20 people that you have to go through for a process that really cuts down on innovation. With the processes, keep it simple. We can keep them happy, without having to go through 20 people that could take up to a year just to get approval. If you are trying to innovate, you need to know someone at the top sponsoring you.
We have good leadership support and realizing how many challenges there are in just in an inter-organizational dynamic. Now you re working with legal or IT just to get a pilot going and they re used to much more operational procedures that take years to implement. Realizing that this is a different kind of activity and calls for a different kind of process and you have senior leadership on board is fantastic advice.
I think what you can do when you do have these barriers, is know that you re the innovation team, you can come up with the idea about how that new process will work. We can take it to the legal team, then to IT and get them onboard and prototype together we can take it back to the organization and see how we can develop that pilot. Engaging the cross-team functionality is so critical because you need a champion in every department. You ll get a lot less resistance in each of those departments.
You have been working on an interesting aspect of innovation, and that s open innovation. Can you share with the audience a little bit about that story?
I am the biggest advocator of open innovation challenges and I m seeing across the board that organizations are choosing to do less in-house and to do more in collaboration externally.
Before we get into that, can you explain to the readers what the meaning of an open innovation project is?
A way of an organization to say we see a problem and we want to commit money, time, and energy to it, but we want other people to help us with the idea and execution of it. When an organization runs an open innovation challenge, they promote it, market it, and create something exciting.
A project I worked on in 2014 called Janssen Hatch, said we see that the AU health system is changing we would like to commit some funds to help that, but we don t have people in house that have great ideas to get behind it, so we ll put a brief out there around the system challenges and see what entrepreneurs and what innovators are in the ecosystem and have some ideas.
The challenge that we set up and the brief we wrote is there s a rising cost of healthcare per capita because people are living longer and they often have chronic conditions they re living with like diabetes, and it s costing the system a lot more money. So if you have ideas to disrupt this pattern and stop flow of patients going to the hospital. We were looking for three things: early detection, care and community, and monitoring.
We had detection tests, prototype materials, anti-bacterial, mental health initiative, a range of things from great innovators in AU.
I would love to hear your thoughts on how our listeners can get started on innovation.
There are three things you can start with to get going. The first would be to learn a new skill and look at what kind of process you may have to go through for new ideas. The second thing I would do is go to meet-ups. You can connect with entrepreneurs, innovators, and healthcare professionals, which is great inspiration. The third thing I would do is exploit your challenge online. You can learn from what other people have done, which is an important part of innovation.
Can you tell us a little bit about the blog you ve started?
I ve been really struck by the way there is a lot of tech health innovation going on and you ve got people in tech talking to you about health issues. And you ve got the healthcare community that are kind of getting a little bit frustrated with that because they re thinking they re telling them how to do deliver care, and I ve been doing it for twenty years. So there s a little friction about getting tech and the healthcare to work together, and I m really trying to get both of them to engage with each other.
Talking about start-ups, talking about health innovation, and changing the conversation from, health is broken, to let s get innovating. That s my passion.
The post Giving patients more control in their health with Katherine Lancman appeared first on CCI Innovation Hubs.