Innovate Health, Not Healthcare: The Mayo Clinic Way

Over sixty professors, health professionals, business leaders, civil servants and students gathered at the Telfer School of Management on March 30 to listen to Dr. Douglas Wood talk about “innovating health, not healthcare” during a seminar organised by the Telfer Health Transformation Exchange (THTex). The purpose of THTex seminars is to “bring together business academics from [The Telfer] school and from others schools, and physicians who are interested in innovating health,” notes Professor Wojtek Michalowski, co-director of the THTex.

During his presentation, Dr. Wood, Medical Director for the Center for Innovation at the Mayo Clinic, explained to the audience how the way they think and work, and their work process, which is very different from other sectors, sustains innovation. For him, innovation is discovering and implementing ways to deliver better health.

The Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation’s experience in transforming how people achieve health offers new insights for delivery system innovation that will help patients and health care professionals. They have a fresh approach on different aspects of health services. More importantly, they concentrate on health professionals and patient experience by thinking about solutions first.

The main key to their processes, led by designers, is to focus on what people in the community need in terms of health delivery services. ‘‘The real measure of successful design is how well it works (…) and that is what we need in healthcare, that it work and that we work together”.

Dr. Wood gave the audience examples of the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation’s successful projects while explaining their approach and how their designers worked to achieve the ‘‘innovation, the integration and navigation of their health processes’’.

After the presentation, the audience engaged discussions relating to healthcare transformation, new technology and integration of processes to the workplace culture.

A special thank you goes to Kathy Cunningham, Wojtek Michalowski and Michael Fung Kee Fung for preparing this seminar. This was a very successful event for the THTex. The next seminar will be held on May 18, 2016, when the THTex will welcome Dr. Eric Isselbacher, Director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab at Massachusetts General in Boston.  He will be speaking on transformation and innovation, using experiences from Mass General.  We look forward to this upcoming event.