Center for Health Systems Innovation at Oklahoma State to Promote Applied Research

The Center for Health Systems Innovation at the Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Okla., opened earlier this year, supported with a $6 million gift from OSU alum and Cerner CEO Neal Patterson.

The goal of the center is to help coordinate multidisciplinary research efforts that can be used to drive healthcare innovation.  

"The reality is a lot of people are doing work in different fields that may have relevance in healthcare, but they're not aware of it," says Rubin Pillay MD, PhD, MBA, interim executive director of the Center, explaining that the center will mine various fields of research for innovation that could be applied to healthcare systems.

Lack of innovation not in technology, but in its impact on outcomes
Dr. Pillay believes healthcare is ripe health information technology and other innovation, but it is failing to translate into improvements in care delivery. "Healthcare is really suffering from innovation overload," he says. "We're basically snowed under with different types of technology, which are all inherently useful and should make a difference in health outcomes, but they don't."

What gives? Dr. Pillay believes the lack of coordination in our current healthcare delivery system could play a role in the industry's inability to turn innovation into improved outcomes. "It's more perhaps a system dysfunction than a lack of technology or lack of HIT or lack of capital," he says.

The Center will seek grants, recruit visiting scholars, produce both written research and carry out pilot testing of programs that seek to uncover innovation that leads to improved health outcomes. The Center will focus its efforts around four core areas: systems optimization, market-based solutions, IT-enabled solutions and new business models for care delivery that move away from fee-for-service payments.

"Could there be a more important issue in America today, and certainly in our state, than healthcare? It is pretty clear that we cannot attempt to solve it with just money. It's going to have to be solved with creativity and innovation, and that is precisely what this Center is all about," OSU President Burns Hargis, said at the time of the Center's opening.

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