Part of the new paradigm is the interest in and the ability to improve process, find new economies of scale, and reinvent how health care is delivered. Old-timers called it spit-balling, but it really is conceptualization and problem-solving at its best.

Call it what you will. It’s here.

More providers are recruiting a Chief Innovation Officer to stimulate change that transforms a hospital’s way of doing its business. Things that were 5 to 10 years out a few years ago are either here now or will be shortly.

Here is a short list of recent initiatives at various hospitals:

!) Take a fresh look at each potential touch point of the Patient Experience journey. Identify the potential friction points that determine an optimum or failed Patient Experience. Reverse engineer the Patient Experience journey for different departments, and service lines where you have recently on-boarded new physicians.

2) Set-up an experiment where caregivers, staff, and volunteer physicians role play as consumers interested in a specific wellness issue. Mix and match the groups. Give each group specific tasks, get their feedback, ask the whys and why not’s, and then reshuffle. Distill the findings into a working document to strengthen and streamline consumer on-boarding.

3) Do a deeper dive into Patient Experience to find volunteers who are entrepreneurs in another industry, conceptualizers, problem-solvers, and community doers. Create 2 working groups. Charge each group with exploring new ideas and suggestions that could enrich Patient Experience.

4) Conceptualize in broad strokes what an ideal wellness initiative should be. Create a working group of caregivers, physician providers, holistic healers, and community thinkers and doers. Create several small working groups. Give each group the same set of goals and a timeline. Then have each group reverse engineer 3 different wellness initiatives. Make sure the working groups remain independent of each other.

5) If the goal is to provide some form of self-scheduling, review service line data takeaways and spitball different possibilities. Create a working group of caregivers, hospital scheduling staff, and community conceptualizers to model various ways to design a self-scheduling pilot program based on real patient data.

6) Create a Round Table of Behavioral Health (BH) caregivers and former BH patients who potentially could serve as professional trained peers in a walk-in clinic or an inpatient BHU. Include representatives from the ED who see the impact of a major BH incident on the triage process. Take advantage of existing peer technology and training programs to make this working group effective.

7) Harness new AI technology to free-up more physician face time with patients and address physician burnout caused by the 15-minute billing cycle and the time needed to enter clinical notes in an EMR. Re-imagine this. Design an optimum clinical day. Ask both questions.

Each of the above taps into intellectual horsepower and talent to ask serious questions, debate possible solutions, and create ideas that can:

• Streamline the patient process
• Optimize Patient Experience
• Design meaningful wellness initiatives
• Create a viable pilot program for self-scheduling
• Address Behavioral Health potential supports
• Halve the time physicians spend entering patient clinical notes

Have some fun with this, but understand problem-solving and launching meaningful change is hard work.

See what ‘Q’ can do for you!