What if a room was alive and could know everything medically pertinent about the patient when he or she entered the room? That wild idea led to UPMC creating the SmartRoom and in 2010 partnering with IBM to take it to market.

"That was a crazy idea that really wasn't that crazy when you thought it through," said Lyle Berkowitz, MD, speaking Sunday at the HIMSS Innovation Symposium.

Berkowitz, associate chief medical officer of innovation at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, a practicing primary care physician and co-author of Innovation with Information Technologies in Healthcare, urged audience members to go ahead and explore those crazy ideas and gave them some tips on on how to do it.

• Little bets to big wins. "A lot of times with innovation, there's a lot of things you have to look at. You're not sure right away which one's going to hit it big."
• Fail early, fail often, fail cheap, fail fast. "The word, 'failure' is just so scary, particularly in healthcare, and yet you have to be that person that says, 'It's OK – as long as you learn and move on.'"
• Don't tell me what you can't do. "It is about not stopping just because something's not working, and figuring out what others say you can't do."
• "You'll get told 'no' a lot," Berkowitz said, "and the thing to do is to understand why someone is not able to move forward and move around it."

"Can you innovate with health IT?" Berkowitz asked. The answer is "yes." "Innovation is about better ideas for processes, technologies and business models. The key is how big an impact it has on the problem you're facing."