The missing link: toward an assessment of innovation capacity in health care organizations

Abstract

The health care sector shows a disjunction between the well-understood necessity for change and the capacity to realize it. Conventional management strategies and traditional means of influencing professionals often fail to deliver projected outcomes. We address this issue from a different angle. An organization's capacity for change is determined by the combination of power distribution, value system and change readiness, which should be analyzed not as formal qualities but as aspects of the organization as a social system, disclosing a reality beneath the surface of mission statements, quality policy and management models. We describe a method to analyse the identity of an organization as a social system with respect to its innovation potential. This identity shows in the rules of discourse determining what is valid communication and which are the sources of impact of arguments in a communicative interaction leading to decisions. We present two case studies in which groups of physicians argue in favor of respectively against the availability of physician-assisted death (PAD) for terminal patients.

Factors contributing to innovation readiness in health care organizations: a scoping review

“…Upcoming challenges such as population aging, staff shortages and reduced funding compel health care organizations to innovate [1][2][3][4][5]. Greenhalgh et al [6] see innovation as "a novel set of behaviors, routines and ways of working that are discontinuous with previous practice, are directed at improving health outcomes, administrative efficiency, cost effectiveness, or user experience and that are implemented by planned and coordinated actions. "…”

“…Health care organizations show large differences in the extent to which they are capable of innovating [10][11][12][13]. Increasing the readiness of health care organizations for innovation is required to meet the challenges they face [1][2][3][4][5]13].…”

“…Although of great importance, embedding innovation structurally in health care organizations is not simple [14][15][16]. Organizations encounter difficulties in structuring their innovation processes [3,17,18], while existing procedures and regulations often restrain innovative initiatives [10,19]; moving to a state of readiness for innovation differs from preparing to introduce a specific innovation [2]. While many studies focus on the implementation of specific treatment or e-health innovations [20][21][22][23][24], scientific knowledge about what is needed for health care organizations to become innovation ready is limited [2,25,26].…”