As the Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s what are your current priorities?
Current priorities are focused on reimagining care delivery for services like primary care and behavioral health. Additionally, our team started around the idea of leveraging existing technologies with application to novel health topics such as monitoring of infectious diseases. We’ve expanded that focus to current issues facing health care like opioids and gun violence.
How do you measure success of Innovation Center within a health system?
We always want to keep a pulse on a few key measures including return on investment for the enterprise and ensuring we’re keeping Boston Children’s mission at the core of everything we do. We also push to have Boston Children’s be at the forefront of new technology adoption. For example, we’ve seen success with voice pilots around the hospital and that effort was recognized by forming a partnership with Amazon Alexa and their beta launch for a HIPAA compliant consumer skill.
Why is deliberate and thoughtful innovation so important to organizations like Boston Children’s?
We spend our day innovating at the bedside and in research labs and it’s vital to take a step back and understand how those innovations could impact populations outside the organization. We believe that our mission as a team is to extend our pediatric leadership globally, and digital tools are a key part of that.
Looking into your crystal ball in say 3 or 5 years; how will your program look different than it is today?
I’m not sure that our program will look different but I think the problems we’re looking to tackle will have changed. Right now there is a big focus in the industry around interoperability and I think we’ll have moved past those difficulties to further embrace large scale change. I also think, historically, adult medicine has seen the bulk of innovation and I hope we’re showing that pediatric medicine is as attractive of a field to enter.
I noticed on LinkedIn you are a professor at Harvard as well. Do you teach Innovation there, if not what do you teach?
Biomedical Informatics and Epidemiology