Earlier this year, Dr. Bertalan Meskó – The Medical Futurist – published The 40 Most Exciting Questions about the Future of Healthcare. As with his other books, I found his ideas interesting and informative. Personally, I found the following five questions most intriguing:

1. Will doctors always have to see patients in person?
2. What will the hospital of the future look like?
3. What comes after the wearable revolution?
4. Should we be afraid of artificial intelligence in medicine?
5. What if people want to replace healthy body parts for prosthetics?

If you’re looking for book that’s focused on trying to understand how healthcare might be changing in the near future, I’d recommend purchasing a copy.

Last month, the Cleveland Clinic revealed their Top 10 Medical Innovations for 2019 at the 2018 Medical Innovation Summit. The focus for the 16th annual summit was “Disruption: Reimagining Healthcare.”

According to their website:

“The annual Top 10 Medical Innovations was developed to share what our clinical leaders are saying to each other and what innovations they feel will help shape healthcare over the next 12 months and beyond.”

They have multiple criteria that medical innovations have to meet before they are considered, including: (a) significant clinical impact; (b) significant patient benefit; (c) high user-related functionality that improves healthcare delivery; (d) high probability of commercial success; (e) available on the market in the next year; (f) must have significant human interest in its application or benefits; and (g) must have the ability to visualize human impact.

This year the Top 10 list includes:

1. Alternative Therapy for Pain: Fighting the Opioid Crisis
2. The Advent of AI in Healthcare
3. Expanded Window for Acute Stroke Intervention
4. Advances in Immunotherapy for Cancer Treatment
5. Patient-Specific Products Achieved with 3D Printing
6. Virtual and Mixed Reality for Medical Education
7. Visor for Prehospital Stroke Diagnosis
8. Innovation in Robotic Surgery
9. Mitral and Tricuspid Valve Percutaneous Replacement
10. RNA-Based Therapies

In their book, Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast: A Blueprint for Transformation from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, the authors provide a healthcare-specific definition for transformative innovation:

Transformative innovation is an evolutionary form of innovation built on an undivided focus on the customer and customer experience. It uses design discipline and scientific methods to integrate and deploy new and existing technologies to improve experiences and efficiencies, and it is often associated with discovering and turning negative experiences into positive ones.

Transformation innovation is innovation that has an impact on the customer irrespective of scale. A transformational innovation substantially changes an experience. It does not matter if the substantial change affects a person, a group or people, or a whole organization. It is transformational irrespective of scale. We use this definition to guide every decision we make in the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation. We constantly ask: Will our actions have the potential to profoundly impact the experience and delivery of health and health care?

A few points.

First, it is INCREDIBLY long. While it is possible to parse it down to its’ essence after reading the definition several times, I’m curious how they clearly communicate the concept to internal stakeholders with such a verbose definition.

Second, while I’m a big fan of having a strong focus on the customer and customer experience in health care, I’m becoming increasingly concerned that such a singular focus is negatively impacting the health care provider experience. I’ll be posting more on this topic in the near future.

Finally, with all that being said, I really did enjoy the book and believe it imparts important information that other health care systems can implement. I hope health care executives will read the book and see the benefits of starting their own innovation centers.