Establishing a culture of innovation among team members can look vastly different for hospitals and health systems.
Here, two chief medical information officers from healthcare organizations across the country discuss their individual approaches to team innovation.
Editor's Note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How do you promote innovation among your team members?
Michael Marino, DO, CMIO at Providence St. Joseph Health (Irvine, Calif.): In large healthcare organizations, promoting innovation can be difficult. Team members too often can be head down in just keeping up with the work on projects at 'scale' or worse, ending up as 'ticket takers.' We are putting together a program to have our internal experts start to focus on what we are calling 'simplification,' looking for easier, more efficient ways of doing the work and not relying on the philosophy that this is the way it always has been done.
To access the full interview, click here.
Lauren Koniaris, MD, CMIO of the Northern Region at Hackensack (N.J.) Meridian Health: I don't think we need to promote innovation; what we need to do is listen to and, when appropriate, act on the ideas presented to us. Every day our team members have wonderful ideas on how to transform healthcare — and they want to see these come to fruition. For those ideas that impact the areas the CMIOs oversee, the key is to keep the lines of communication as open as possible. We achieve this in multiple ways — feedback, email addresses, publishing our cell phones, hosting town halls and coffee talks.
To access the full interview, click here.
To participate in future Becker's Q&As, contact Jackie Drees at jdrees@beckershealthcare.com.