High Value Health Care Incubator
CERC’s Impact Accelerator emerged from our High Value Health Care (HVHC) Incubator program, which partnered with safety-net organizations serving vulnerable communities in Northern California. The goal of the HVHCI was to discover and scale innovative ideas and programs creating value for marginalized populations and reducing the overall cost of care.
"We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
~Albert Einstein
About CERC
The Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC) is the first US academic medical center dedicated to researching and teaching processes that promote high-quality health care services while lowering the overall cost of care. Its publications have been frequently cited by national and international authorities and its trainees have played important roles in health care organizations.
Core Values
The CERC HVHC Incubator combines four core values that encourage innovation in the safety net sector. The HVHC Incubator:
1. Solicits problems from clinics providing care to safety net patients and guides their staff through a problem-solving process. The CERC Incubator aims to find ‘bottom-up’ solutions that can be scaled from clinic-to-clinic.
2. Supplies hands-on coaching and support to the clinics and teams during the year-long process of problem discovery, synthesis, brainstorming, prototyping and pilot testing.
3. Uses techniques that have emerged from industry and academia that have proven successful in innovation projects. These include driving change with small teams and the use of human centered design methodologies and rapid-cycle testing.
4. Uses the power of competition to select candidate proposals most likely to have positive impact and to scale across multiple sites.
High Value Health Care Incubator & Human Centered Design
The Incubator’s concept is that small teams of people including those who work on the front lines and generally have the best understanding of their own work. Using a socialized problem-solving technique (Human Centered Design) in a structured process assisted by experienced support can effect meaningful change in primary care.
The Human Centered Design process allows the team to better understand how health care functions from the patient perspective - what they want and need vs. how they currently experience the care they receive.
How the Incubator Works
The HVHC Incubator is a year-long project involving a cohort of three Northern California Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) that seek to solve an operational problem affecting their clinical practice and the communities they serve. FQHCs participating in the HVHC Incubator must first identify and describe a problem in their practice that has downstream negative effects on service, outcomes, and total cost of care. Clinics must also carefully select a small team of staff to participate part-time in a “Design Camp” where they will be joined by design experts and faculty from CERC, NYU and Emory University.
Features of Incubator Design Teams
1. Solve problems in the local setting by those who know the local setting the best.
1. Small, diverse teams with the time and space and independence to try out new approaches.
2. “Rapid Cycle Iterations” vs. top-down planning in a vacuum.
3. Coaching by Future Medical Systems, Impact Lab, and Stanford CERC faculty.
4. Scaling from few to the many – built-in from the beginning.
5. Financial support to teams to create the space and time for creative problem solving and scaling.
What Does Success Look Like?
The Incubator enables participating teams to make consequential positive and sustainable change on a problem that patients, providers and stakeholders share an interest in solving. While the nature of those interests may differ, they can be aligned and enhance one another. For example, patients seek care that meets their wants and needs in a supportive, timely and efficient manner; clinical staff may identify goals of patient outcomes or staff satisfaction as meaningful while payers look to quantifiable reductions in overall healthcare spend.
The Incubator leadership welcomes those outcomes but adds outcomes satisfying the goals of funders and research partners. The key point is that system innovations have multiple effects and that these varied interests play roles in the selection of participants, problems, and the design of the prototype solution.
Success Is:
Desirable
· It meets a human need.
Feasible
· It’s technically possible.
Viable
· It recognizes the constraints of its environment.
Success must be meaningful to all stakeholders:
· Patients: “Care when and where I want and need it.”
· FQHC leadership and staff: Increases clinic efficiency and joy in work.
· Health Plan: Lowers the total per-capita cost of care by decreasing ED visits and hospital admissions.
