Innovations in hospitals

Introduction

In today's world health care providers deal with multiple complex and pressing problems including the aging population, an ever-increasing proportion of patients with chronic diseases, cancer deaths, childhood and adult obesity, escalating costs, regulatory interventions, and increasing responsibilities for patient safety. health care innovation offers important promises to address many of these problems. Many studies show that an emphasis on innovation is critical to efforts to fuel growth, maintain market share, and improve patient satisfaction and clinical quality, efficiency, and delivery.

Innovation has been studied in depth by researchers belonging to various disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and organization theory. Researchers, though with different objectives, analyzed and offered several insights into the complex and dynamic nature of innovation. In spite of the richness of the studies, there appears to be a general lack of conceptual clarity. All these make research on innovation challenging and exciting.

An innovation in health care is defined here as “a set of behaviors, routines and ways of working, along with any associated administrative technologies and systems” which are:

– perceived as new by a proportion of key stakeholders,

– linked to the provision or support of health care,

– discontinuous with previous practice,

– directed at improving health outcomes, administrative efficiency, cost-effectiveness, or the user experience, and

– implemented by means of planned and co-ordinated action by individuals, teams or organizations.