Collaboration Fosters Success within OSF Innovation
It’s been a little over a year since the OSF Innovation space opened on the third and fourth floors of the Jump Trading Simulation & Education Center. The co-working environment is purpose-built to house a variety of disciplines within OSF and act as a central hub for creating solutions to health care’s most complex problems. The idea was that placing these teams under one roof would promote collaboration to generate ideas, test them and rapidly deliver solutions.
OSF Innovation leaders have spent the last year determining the best ways to work together in an efficient and effective manner to truly transform health care for the benefit of the patients and communities the organization serves. The launch of Care Transformation, a new model that aims to expand access to care within primary care clinics, was one of the first projects that demonstrated how multidisciplinary teams could successfully carry out transformation.
The complete roll out of Care Transformation was originally slated for October 2019.
“Because of the skill sets coming together, the data we were able to assess, the leaders we worked with and what we learned along the way, we were able to greatly shorten the ability to roll out that new model to our care practices,” said Becky Buchen, Vice President of Performance Improvement, a Division of OSF Innovation.
All primary care clinics within OSF HealthCare are now expected to have the Care Transformation model in place by May of next year, 18 months ahead of schedule. Results have been promising with an increase of more than 2000 patients from the first seven clinics where the model was implemented. Patient satisfaction has also improved at these sites and there have been increases in the number of pneumonia vaccinations, colon and breast cancer screenings given to patients.
The OSF Innovation leadership team over the last year has also defined where it will focus efforts over the next five years. Teams made up of different disciplines will work to solve the biggest challenges facing disadvantaged populations, including financial hardship, their age or their distance to a health care facility.
“Using the effective implementation of Care Transformation as a model, we built upon the strengths to create a multidisciplinary collaborative innovation process to address these opportunities,” said Sarah de Ramirez, Vice President of Transformation Innovation. “A team called, ‘Complex Solution Innovation (CSI),’ has developed a standard for a multidisciplinary team approach, how to collaborate and innovate around the toughest problems in healthcare, centered in our 4 focus areas.”
Buchen says the focus areas OSF Innovation will tackle over the next five years will require a unified, collaborative culture.
“My hope for the future is that we continue to engage not only the 200 Mission Partners who are here and leverage the skill sets that they have, but also then engage and reach out to our communities to help them solve and see OSF and OSF Innovation in particular as a partner, not a place that innovation occurs but rather a partner to help support innovation,” said Buchen.