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Published on: October 1, 2007
Mission possible: open innovation in nursing and patient care services at Massachusetts General Hospital
Hiyam M Nadel1, Nour Al-Sultan2, Alex Berger2
1Institute for Patient Care, Mass General Brigham, Boston, Massachusetts, USA hnadel@mgh.harvard.edu.
Objectives:
Although front-line nurses and staff are uniquely positioned to identify the inefficiencies and gaps in care delivery, formal processes are not always in place to hear from those very employees.
Design:
We established a scalable process that embodies open innovation principles, to broaden and distribute the innovation locus.
Setting:
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA.
Particpitants:
We invited 8800+ nurses and other direct caregivers to participate in organisational problem solving.
Interventions:
We solicited employees to (1) identify pain points and develop solutions and (2) crowd vote to indicate which ideas they want to see implemented.
Results:
177 employees submitted 225 ideas, and 928 cast a vote. The 40 participants who submitted top-voted ideas were invited to develop a detailed implementation plan; of those, 27 submitted one. Four ideas emerged as winners.
Conclusions:
Formulating a clear call for ideas, securing leadership buy-in and generating excitement about the process were essential to our efforts. Challenges associated with opening the innovation process involved managing a large volume of participants and submissions, and providing on-the-go training to nurses and staff who were not used to being asked to participate in organisational problem solving.
