Please give us an overview of the Orlando Health Strategic Initiative and how it came to be?
As a health system that hasn’t had a dedicated program, team and resources to support innovation efforts until the last few years, we are catching up, in a sense, to other leading institutions across the country. Our goal from the outset was to use best practices and models that have proven effective for other health systems and industries, but setup in a way that made sense for Orlando Health and who we are as an organization. Our goal is to create a process that ensures our team members’ and physicians’ best ideas are heard and are given the greatest opportunity to develop. We also wanted to create pathways to engage innovative startups in the healthcare space that are doing things in new and exciting ways.
What are your top priorities for the program?
We had two primary goals when we launched the Strategic Innovations program – the first is to infuse innovation into our culture and make Orlando Health a place where innovative thinking is encouraged and collaborative problem solving happens organically. In a way, developing an innovation program is initiating a culture shift. The second goal is to recognize economic return from our efforts; creating new revenue streams from the efforts of our physicians and team members. Orlando Health Strategic Innovations has created four unique project portfolios— Foundry, Ventures, Partnerships and Grants—all of which support Orlando Health’s mission and strategic imperatives. Over time, I’m certain these will shift as the program and organization continue to evolve.
Why is deliberate and thoughtful innovation so important to organizations like Orlando Health?
As the healthcare landscape continues to rapidly evolve, Orlando Health must continue to transform the healthcare we provide to the communities we serve. We have always placed great value in adopting solutions that enable our team to offer more efficient and effective care, but the future requires us to dream even bigger. We believe that one of the best sources of innovative ideas and inspiration is our team members and physicians. We launched Orlando Health Strategic Innovations to provide a structured process to support internal innovation with strong commercial potential, as well as identifying innovative partners disrupting the healthcare industry that could help us accelerate our progress toward strategic goals.
We also wanted to ensure that we weren’t innovating for the innovation’s sake. We want to provide our team with tools to address real pain points and challenges that they encounter. The collective passion and consistent drive to improve the care and experience our patients receive is at the heart of each project we advance. But more important than the milestones each project will achieve, it’s clear that these are the right things to do for our patients. We realize that Orlando Health’s future success will be driven by how well we collaborate and creatively address healthcare’s biggest challenges.
What are a couple things that surprised you as you got the program going that other Health System Innovation leaders can learn from?
We’ve been pleasantly surprised and encouraged by how ready, willing and able our team members are to jumpstart their own project or jump right into assisting a colleague’s project. It became clear very quickly that many of our team members were hungry for the type of support and resources we provide to advance projects. One of my favorite times during the year is when we hold Innovation Workshops each fall. We create a fun, interactive and encouraging space for team members and physicians to share ideas, get feedback, provide guidance to one another and learn how their idea could benefit from our different initiatives. The discussion and constructive criticism that are exchanged between our team members is really exciting and encouraging. By getting people from different disciplines out of their normal environment, around a table trying to solve a problem and design a solution together is really a joy to watch.
It’s also been surprising how many thoughtfully designed and innovative ideas are flowing our way and we’re already thinking of new channels we can create to address them all. I would encourage Health System Innovation leaders to create opportunities to listen to what your team needs to advance projects or ideas. Use the feedback and guidance you get from them to design what your program looks like. There was a quote that was popular at HIMSS Global Conference this past February, “If you’ve seen one Innovation Center, you’ve seen one Innovation Center.” We all do things a little different with varying priorities, so letting your team help guide what the program or approach looks like and what it supports is a great way to not only move toward success, but create engagement along the way.
Looking into your crystal ball in say 3 or 5 years; how will your program look different than it is today?
My hope is that we move into a more continuous cycle, with new projects and teams working on their ideas in parallel throughout the year. We’ve intentionally created some guardrails around the volume of projects we take on to ensure success. Over time I hope the team supporting innovation and the volume of projects in flight at any given time both increase. I also expect that, over time, we’ll create new, more tailored channels for ideas to flow through for refinement, piloting, scale and commercialization. We could have dedicated channels for IT innovation and software development, as well as a channel for medical devices. Another goal of mine over the next few years is to build a local community of manufacturers, developers, engineers and companies that can continue to partner on designing, developing and launching these products together for shared success. Lastly, I hope that in a few years we have a long list of successfully commercialized ideas and projects that demonstrate the success of our program.
Michael Schmidt, MBA
Michael Schmidt is the Managing Director of Strategic Innovations at Orlando Health, leading efforts to accelerate innovation and commercialization across Orlando Health, a $3.2 billion healthcare system in Orlando, FL. The Strategic Innovations program brings to life ideas, concepts and inventions from team members and physicians that innovate the delivery healthcare and the tools used to deliver that care, as well as strategically investing in and partnering with external, early stage companies and technologies that are transforming the healthcare industry. Michael has an MBA from the University of Florida.