Seven Practices for Innovation in Healthcare Products

The successful delivery of precision medicine or that which is personalized to an individual patient’s health needs will increasingly be highly dependent on information technology and information systems designed to support the delivery of clinical and nontraditional health services. Innovation and extensive development of the required technology products represent a significant financial investment, much of which will be borne by healthcare enterprises and, ultimately, by patients. This chapter presents seven practices to support innovative healthcare product design. These practices include leveraging case-based patient and physician/provider centered requirements gathering to help ensure end product efficacy, even when end users cannot accurately specify their needs for solutions that may not yet exist. Also introduced is the rational approach of capture and use of data from atypical sources to offset product development decision-making errors that commonly result in product failure post market introduction. Preemptive concept development as a tool to ensure that development teams are confident in their ability to select the best solution when divergent solutions present as a function of the variability intrinsic in the development process is described, along with the use of ethno-graphic tool-based workflow analysis and cognitive analysis as product cost-effective evaluation strategies. Lastly, this chapter proposes the use of guideline evaluation tools and technology enabled observation as preemptive strategies to reduce design errors. This chapter delivers practical approaches that can be used by individuals across the spectrum of healthcare product development to meaningfully contribute to efficacious technology products at lower development costs.