Since 2013, the Digital Innovation Hub at Brigham and Women’s Hospital has been harnessing the smart ideas and passion projects of staff from across the Boston academic medical center.

Known as iHub, the initiative has leveraged hundreds of innovative ideas from all levels of the Harvard teaching hospital, enabling an array of projects focused on fixing challenges large and small, resulting in process improvements, safety initiatives, cost savings and more. That sort of crowdsourced approach to driving clinical and operational improvements has been especially useful during the pandemic.

At HIMSS22, Dr. Mark Zhang, DO, associate chief medical information officer at Brigham and Women's and medical director of iHub, will offer a close look at some innovative ideas (some of which have evolved into startup companies) that have been nurtured through the initiative. And he'll offer advice for other academic medical centers – or any provider seeking to launch an innovation center – about guiding employees' good ideas toward transformative system-wide improvements.

In his talk, "Supporting Digital Innovation in Academic Medicine," Zhang will explain how the hospital makes it easy for staff members with an idea to reach out and schedule innovation consults – and how the iHub then offers guidance and resources to help bring those ideas to fruition.

He'll discuss how Brigham and Women's uses what it calls a COFT framework (clinical, operational, financial, technology) to guide these innovation consults, and will explain how iHub offers longitudinal support to its internal innovators as their ideas are shaped and operationalized. He'll describe some of the success stories the program has enabled – and give some tips for other health systems and academic medical centers (AMCs) seeking to try something similar.

"We're a special projects team within IS, so when there's a leadership or business requirement from operations that doesn't naturally fit into an existing workstream within our IS organization, our team is one that can do it," Zhang explains. "Or if it's something that's kind of early-stage and needs to be proved out, we're the team that does that."

For example, BWH was one of the first academic medical centers to deploy blue dot digital wayfinding technology. iHub has also helped design and develop an array of other custom-built apps for a variety of different use cases over the years.

As an innovation center, "we offer a service to anyone that works at the Brigham who has an idea in digital; we function essentially as an internal consultant and mentor and guide," said Zhang. 

At HIMSS22, he'll go into detail about what it really means to provide that service to a large, complex organization filled with a lot of smart people with really good ideas: "What does that actually mean to provide that type of expertise, why it's important and some of the outcomes, some of the practical lessons that we've learned doing this work," he said.

"If someone comes in with potentially a really exciting idea but we've never done it before, we want to make sure people understand the type of commitment it might involve, and also to right-size the idea to a practical next step to actually hopefully see it move forward.

"We've done innovation consults almost since the beginning of the iHub," he added. "But probably in the last three to four years has really been when we kind of try to formalize it into an actual kind of service line, with structure. And that's what we'll be talking about."

Some innovations sprung from iHub ideas have been adopted elsewhere, said Zhang. For example, early during the pandemic, Brigham and Women's was one of the first hospital systems to introduce a daily COVID-19 symptom screener and attestation tool. It open-sourced the software, and the technology is now underpinning similar apps at other health systems around the country.

More than 18 million attestations later, "it's become the tool that allows our employees to schedule vaccines, to schedule testing; it's really become a critical technology within our COVID-19 management," said Zhang, who noted that it also helped shape development of patient-facing pre-screen tools that have been essential over the past two years.

At HIMSS22, Zhang hopes to offer useful advice for other hospitals and AMCs that are interested in or thinking about starting an innovation group, he said. "What does that mean, and how do you practically do it?"

iHub has "been around for eight-plus years now, and a lot of what we've done took a lot of internal work to understand what's actually helpful," he said. That is "because as an innovation group, we have multiple kinds of customers and bosses. There's leadership, but then we also have the staff. And how do we actually add value to both of these parties, or any party that we kind of cater to? My hope is that this talk will give a practical perspective and also just an overview of our experience, so far, creating this."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.