patient innovation

Chris Seper, in MedCity News, says that more health systems “should create patient innovation committees, which would consider patients’ ideas to improve care and, when deemed worthy, run with them. Patients are smarter by the second, increasingly attuned to the issues in healthcare, and their valuable insights are lost if we don’t capture them before they heal and move on.”

“{Some} jospitals already have patient committees: Johns Hopkins, Cleveland’s University Hospitals and Michigan’s Spectrum Health are just a few examples. Sometimes, these groups have in their mandate to find ‘creative and cost-effective solutions to problems.”’

But “the focus of these committees are on training and patient-experience metrics.”

“That’s extremely valuable. But patients can do more.

“A Patients Committee on Innovation wouldn’t be made up of patients, necessarily, but perhaps members of a hospital’s innovation or tech transfer team. The committee would review patient ideas… Great projects would get seed money and a chance to grow.”

“If they scale, patients {would} receive some compensation and the hospitals that foster the projects get two competitive advantages: new products no one else has and the realization they’re listening to their customers in a way no one else is.”