Innovation Learning Network

The Weirdness is Coming

Reprinted from InSights.ILN.org

The sprint is on for the final touches of  “WEIRD PAIRINGS & ENGINEERED RANDOM COLLISIONS,” where 80 ILNers and friends will descend on Toronto for three days with our hosts, Saint Elizabeth and MaRS Discovery District.

Coffeehouses/Nursing (ANA), Firemen/Rugs (HealthPartners), Dining/Caregiving (Cincinnati Children’s), and many more will bring the magic from these strange collisions to life. Follow us from Oct 27 – 29 on Twitter:  #ILN15

Whether or not you can join (admittedly, we filled up fast!), we compiled a list of weird articles to get you thinking:

• Five Ways To Innovate By Cross-Pollinating Ideas
• Po (lateral thinking)
• Everything Interesting Happens At The Boundaries
• What Health Care Can Learn From Amazon
• What the Uber of health care will look like
• If Air Travel Worked Like Health Care
• Colliding Towards Innovation
• Tony Hsieh’s Rule for Success: Maximize Serendipity
• This is the epic rap video that will change how you feel about dying
• Hospitals Seeking An Edge Turn To Unlikely Adviser: A Carmaker
• The new market builders for health innovation
• What Can Healthcare Leaders Learn from Retail Leaders?
• A Closer Look at Gamification in Healthcare
• A Smart New Tool To Demystify The Design Process
• Lego Makes Everything Better – Even A Prosthetic For Kids
• Clever Instagrams Splice Together Wildly Unrelated Objects
• The Longshot Electric Car Being Developed by China’s Netflix
• What kills most innovation isn’t a lack of ideas, it’s a lack of relationships
• What are the key ingredients necessary to accelerate innovation in any environment?
• Serendipitous exchanges fuel innovation
• Measuring the patient experience: Lessons from other industries
• Zoom Wants Health Care to Be More Like Visiting An Apple Store
• Meet The Non-MD’s Solving Systematic Health Care Problems For Global Health Corps
• Our System Futures: Beyond the Red Tape Debate
• Going from Napkin Sketch to MedTech Sold via Amazon
• Here’s What 6 Doctors Really Think of Dr. Google
• How Tiny Sensors Are Driving Innovation in Medicine
• 14 Things We Can Learn From Kids
• The art and science of network weaving
• Institutionalising Serendipity via Productive Coffee Breaks
• 5 Ways to Make Innovations Bigger: Avoiding the innovation squeeze
• Hiroshi Ishii
• What can health care learn from Moneyball?
• The Value of the Deepest Reaches of Your Network

ILN Insights Magazine: the Blurry (R)evolution Issue

Get your Insights copy here ==>  goo.gl/1AOspQ

Director’s Message

I ended last year’s ILN director’s message with “The year ahead of us promises to be exciting and turbulent. If ever there was a time that innovation and design are needed, it’s now.” Little did we know how exciting and how turbulent, nor how much innovation and design are still needed. We spent most of the year with an anxious anticipation for the ACA Exchanges. And their launch was messy to say the least. Big change and big innovation are messy, but this also points to the lesson we all know well: fail early to succeed sooner.

So 2013 for the ILN was a year of experimentation, with little failures guiding us to bigger success. The Spring InPerson hosted by Boston University and the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) is a great example. We learned from past meetings that the basic Open Space format is great, but there was something missing to jolt the work to the next level. And so, we added seed funding distributed by crowdsourcing. The jolt was felt. Via experimentation the theme of (R)evolution inspired three projects to move forward. You can explore one of these (r)evolutionary projects on page 80.

The experimentation continued with the Autumn InPerson co-hosted by the UCLA Institute for Innovation in Health and the Center for Care Innovations. This meeting’s experiment was size. Just how big can an ILN InPerson get and still be meaningful? Over 160 attendees proved that bigger is sometimes better. It also was fitting that our theme was Blur. Although it was intended to suggest the disappearing line between care and life (and wow, were there some cool ideas!), it also doubled as an inflection point for ILN InPerson Meetings. The ILN meetings are getting big. Do we constrain them or open them up? It’s blurry. There are no right answers. But we have some surprises in store for 2014 and 2015. Stay tuned.

And so here is to celebrating the blurry, the unknown, and the experiments; it’s where great things live.

Yours in innovation,

Chris McCarthy

#Healthcare, #FineArt and #Hockey

As a part of the InnovationLearningNetwork.Org InPerson Meeting in Los Angles this week, attendees split into a dozen groups and were set loose to hunt for insight and inspiration. My team and I found it at the Getty Museum exploring the evolving museum industry and its future. It was remarkable how similar its challenges are to healthcare…and how much we can learn from their experience.  Nik Honeysett, its Administrator gave us the 101.

First of all, the industry changed “overnight”.  For centuries, highly skilled curators would collect and interpret.  And the public had only one option; go to the museum to see it. Then with little warning, the public got a voice via the internet. And the paradigm began a monumental shift: the public wanted new ways to see the collections, they wanted to talk about it, and they wanted to help influence it.  The museums were not prepared for this voice, nor have most learned yet how to harness it fully; but they are learning.

Nik shared a story of a Canadian museum of fine art that attempted to crowdsource an exhibit.  The public submitted and voted for a hockey exhibition – not exactly what the museum had in mind; or even in the genre of fine art.  Although this was shared as crowdsourcing gone wrong, I can easily image a twist where the museum could have commissioned a series of oil paintings of hockey scenes; dragging in a whole new audience into their world.

Next technology seeped into the museums.  Most often it was a random employee who just happened to know how to flip on a PC, they were the first museum technologists. Interestingly, museums were the first to bring touchscreens and hyperlinks to the public in 80’s.  Not so bad for being homegrown. Recently there has been a shift to bring in trained technologist, but at the expense of “sullying” the inner museum world with those who did not rise through the ranks. Finally, new and interesting business models began to emerge.  As most museums are not-for-profit, and have similar missions, rather than competing, they focused on cooperating. Deals like two venues for the price of one began to emerge.  “Retail museums” began to appear as popup stores in downtown areas .  And unique combinations like museum and DJs began providing new experiences for new crowds.

And so healthcare is not as unique as it perceives, and has much it can learn by simply going out into the world.  I am certain that the other eleven groups found an equal amount of insight and knowledge in their LA exploration.  Meanwhile, go to the museum; the inspiration is curated for you.

CareAnywhere: an African Adventure

Zambia @ Safari Camp / 4 July @ 8pm: “its called what?!?!” The two fellow travelers, who also happend to be doctors, were in agreement that if I go SCUBA diving in Lake Malawi that I should seek treatment for a water parasite called schistosomiasis.

Zambia @ Airport / 5 July @ 10am: Using m.kp.org * on my SmartPhone, I email my doctor about the Lake Malawi parasite concern.

Malawi @ Airport / 5 July @ 3pm: Again using, m.kp.org I receive the following note back from my doctor: “I will discuss with my infectious disease specialist and get back to you. Be safe but have loads of fun! And take lots of pictures.”

Malawi @ Lake Malawi / 6 July @ 3pm: Kicking back having a cocktail by the lake and reading Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on my iPad, I notice that I received another email from my doctor: “A prescription for Praziquantel will be mailed to you. Have a safe trip home.”

Malawi @ Lake Malawi 30 feet below the surface / 7 July @ 10am: I am enjoying the most amazing freshwater SCUBA dive of my life. My dad has been raising fish from this lake for 30 years, and this is a once in a lifetime chance to swim through what looks like my dad’s fish tank…but a billion times bigger.

San Francisco @ home / 10 July @ 2pm: I’ve just arrived home, and sitting in the mailbox is the prescription.

The above is true, amazing, and what the world of healthcare should be. Its seems so unreal the I was able to receive care by MY doctor based in San Francisco while I am on safari in Zambia, and that the care was coordinated, timely and precise. I can only imagine that in a few short years that this will be the standard. But right now I am basking in the awe that what many innovators have been dreaming about for decades literally manifested this past Fourth of July. Now that is independence!

A few years back the Innovation Learning Network explored the wide world of telemedicine. The premise was to explore how one might be able to receive care anywhere, anytime by people who knew you. We brought that exploration together into a nice booklet called CareAnywhere. For most, CareAnywhere was an “imagine if” exercise. Well, I’ve just had my first REAL CareAnywhere…

….and it is everything I thought it would be.
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*NOTE: m.kp.org is designed for SmartPhones.  Use kp.org when using a computer.

Insights 2011 – a recap of all things ILN

Each year, my organization the Innovation Learning Network compiles a “best of” from the previous 365 days. I am thrilled to share this work with you. Highlights include:

• gamification
• analogous observation
• care in 2031
• a few cool tools for research and group interactions

The PDF is free (and green!); however if you would like a hard copy, you may order it here.

Enjoy!

The Big Bold Future

Wow. The Autumn 2011 Innovation Learning Network InPerson Meeting was a chaotic magical dream state. I am not quite sure if I’ve woken back up. 150 innovators and leaders from around the country gathered to build the future of healthcare. The theme was complex yet simple: connected health. And it encompassed broad reaching policies and deep, yet to be developed technologies.

We sent the innovators on an innovation safari on Day 1 to fifteen extraordinary SFBay organizations. We exposed them to 10 super cool technologies and concepts in a progressive lunch (we paired finger foods with technology…and wow was that a cool way to learn!). And then we gave six hours to brainstorm and prototype healthcare in 2031.

From SmartBathrooms and SmartSupermarkets, to a Healthcare Political Party and friendly cloud computing the future were as brilliant as they were diverse. All gave us a glimpse of what we know is to come.

Now the hard work: dragging 2031 as fast as we can to the present. Our innovators will coalesce around the most promising ideas, the ones were passion is high and collaboration is needed….and do something about it. Stay Tuned!!

Finally a special thanks to my home Kaiser Permanente and to my dear friends the California Healthcare Foundation. We co-hosted and sponsored this event.

Networthless?!?!

Networking. It’s a dirty, soulless word. Images of either stiff suits passing out business cards OR of data flowing across wires is conjured to the mind. Lets take the first image: the suits. Back in college I remember my university setting up networking events, and they were always the same; dressing up in a suit and tie and wandering around meeting people. It was a crap shoot. Rarely did any real connection ever get made. The second image is the data network: information flowing across circuits. This is closer to the purpose of networking so that data does flow, and freely.

As the founder of the Innovation Learning Network I was invited to give a tips and tricks of building a network last week to 150 of the nation’s top healthcare innovators at an event sponsored by the Federal Government. They were pretty shocked when I spent most of my time redefining the word. Really what networking means is building friendships. It means making real connections with real people by breaking bread, by asking about lives, talking about vacations and THEN exploring work. Dozens of the meeting attendees came up to say that they hadn’t thought of networking in that way. I blame MBA schools for this. They have stripped the humanity from a deeply human endeavor.

No sooner did I complete the DC talk, I found myself sitting on my United flight back to San Francisco reading the latest issue of Fast Company, and was floored by perhaps the most soulless new word: networthless: Any conversation you have at a conference that doesn’t involve networking, selling or closing. Do not make the mistake of making normal small talk. I love Fast Company and am a printed subscriber, and believe me that says a lot! But the word is an even baser variant of the word networking. Now it’s considered a waste of time talking to someone if they don’t increase your immediate value. How incredibly shortsighted!

We’re not robots who are data mining. We’re people who are multidimensional and deeply complex. Celebrate this, and you will find yourself at amazing dinners, tasting new wines, laughing about old exes, AND making a connection to get your latest idea launched. Life is sweet, and the most unexpected, serendipitous moments are the sweetest.

Playful and Messy

Christine Richter and I just finished presenting a very special WebEx on KP’s innovative nurse shift change called Nurse Knowledge Exchange Plus (NKEplus). The format of the WebEx was a new feature of the Innovation Learning Network to help diffuse innovation across systems. This blog post is not about that, but about one question that really caught my attention:

“what special skills does your group bring to implementation? Meaning what would we be missing if we tried to implement without you?”

The answer is “being playful and messy”. Too often when implementing new stuff, the “serious factor” rises exponentially. There is pervading sense that all must go right and tolerance for the imperfection plummets. And this is exactly what we combat when we implement new ideas. We try to help the end user and management take on a playful and messy attitude. Get them to smile, laugh and stumble….laugh again, and get it a little more right. Official permission for playfulness goes a long way: stress is reduced, and users become more perfect, faster.
So give it at try. You will be amazed at the serious results from being truly playful.

(and smile).

For those of you interested in implementing NKEplus you can signup and get more info here: http://goo.gl/FhwW8