The article from kevinmd.com (a favorite site of mine) below raised a great question: what is the definition of innovation? The article mentions the DaVinci robot used in surgery in hospitals, but is that really innovation? The author says, not really, it is just a fancy way to perform surgery and doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes (I am not against the DaVinci robot - in fact, we studied the science behind it extensively during my undergrad Biomedical Engineering days at Johns Hopkins).
So back to the question - what is innovation? A lot of people think innovation has to be flashy. It doesn't! An innovation can be as simple as a checklist - a major tool being touted by Dr. Atul Gawande for delivering safer care with much less preventable errors. You could throw a checklist into software, but the software isn't the innovation; it's still the checklist.
In my mind, innovation is a simple tool, or an idea, to deliver a better outcome. That outcome is defined by the marketplace and the user. In healthcare, today, in typically means lower costs, safer care and easier user.
That's what we focus on at Mobile Aspects - helping hospitals deliver care through a simpler workflow and having rich, accurate data. Though everyone looks at our best of breed RFID technology as the innovation, it's actually just the vehicle. Our CTO (Timur Sriharto) and all our engineers are innovators because they work closely with our customers. They see the problems they have on a daily basis in hospital surgery and help them find easier ways to deliver care.
For example, many systems in healthcare want users to login with a text ID and password; some even use biometrics. Our team immediately saw that this is difficult in surgery - caregivers are wearing gloves which can make data entry difficult and the powder from gloves makes biometric thumbprint difficult. While other companies tried to enhance biometric sign in, our team said forget it! We were the first to say - 'You already have an ID card, we'll just use that to login.' There are actually more challenges to this than you would think, but our customers were excited by this simple idea, so we ran after it. Now in our systems, users don't touch a keyboard once, or do any data entry with their fingers- its simplicity in the design that makes our systems so effective and reliable.
That's innovation - a simple tool or idea that brings a better outcome to the end market and user. It can be packaged many ways, but it doesn't need to be more or flashier than that.
In Medicine, Falling for Fake Innovation
