We often associate innovations with costly and complicated new gizmos. We may even expect to spend a great deal of money on the new solution. In my opinion, that is a failure of imagination. Some of the best innovations might actually be free!
This article in the New York Times gives an example in healthcare. Patient surveys are becoming an increasingly important factor in the overall grades that hospitals get as a measurement of patient outcomes. This has led to a new goal: reducing patient suffering. This elusive factor in overall quality is very difficult to measure (much less address).
Here is the story of how one innovator developed his solution:
That is how Dr. Michael Bennick, the medical director for patient experience at Yale-New Haven Hospital, solved a problem. He noticed a question on a Medicare survey asking, Is it quiet in your room at night?
Maybe, Dr. Bennick thought, what is really being asked is: Can you get a good night’s sleep without interruption? Is it really necessary to wake patients again and again to take blood pressure and pulse rates, to draw blood, to give medications?
He issued instructions for his unit. No more routinely awakening patients for vital signs. And plan the timing of medications; outside intensive care units, three-quarters of drugs can be given before patients go to sleep and again in the morning.
Then there were the blood tests. “Doctors love blood tests,” Dr. Bennick said, and want results first thing in the morning when they make rounds. That meant waking patients in the wee hours.
“I told the resident doctors in training: ‘If you are waking patients at 4 in the morning for a blood test, there obviously is a clinical need. So I want to be woken, too, so I can find out what it is.’ ” No one, he said, ever called him. Those middle-of-the-night blood draws vanished.
Without anything else being done about noise in the halls, the medical unit’s score on that question rose from the 16th percentile to the 47th nationally in the Medicare survey. Now the entire hospital follows that plan.
“And it did not cost a penny,” Dr. Bennick said. “The only cost was thinking not from our perspective but from a patient’s perspective.”
While some of these recommendations may seem "common sense", in reality they are not widely practiced. In my own experience, I often wondered why it was so critical to have someone burst into your darkened room as you were in a deep sleep and flip on all the lights to take your vital signs. It would seem that rest is very important to the recovery process.
There are more anecdotes in the full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/health/doctors-strive-to-do-less-harm-by-inattentive-care.html?_r=0
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