The objective of this article is to bring awareness to the changing landscape of the healthcare ecosystem and the clinician’s role with respect to medical devices, medical systems, technology, and processes involved in the system. Clinicians interact with them every day and have a huge implication for them directly, and to their patients indirectly. Clinicians are actively involved in clinical research which involves the knowledge and practice of the disease, diagnosis and management, etc. Recently, the role of non-clinical aspects such as medical devices, processes and systems of the healthcare ecosystem is gaining popularity. Hence, there is potential to explore this aspect of the healthcare delivery system to redesign and innovate for improving clinical outcomes. To achieve this, the clinicians need to understand these systems from a perspective that will help them to identify the problems and develop innovative solutions. Just like the clinical research is systematic and methodical, the improvement of the medical systems is also methodical to a large extent. This includes concepts and techniques that are quite fresh and new to a clinician who probably has never been exposed to these in their medical careers. These general principles of Innovation and Design thinking applied to other domains have yielded fantastic results and for the same to be applied in the medical domain, the role of the practicing clinician is central. As clinicians, we have always practiced innovation at some point of time in our career when we would have faced a resource crunch and were compelled to save the children and hence have tried to innovate on the devices, processes, etc., in our own way and has worked many a times. To generate many such solutions at large scale, the whole process needs to be methodical and systematic so that the solutions developed are safe and consistent at all times. Such a solution can be scaled up and made to reach across such setups where it is needed and there can be a measurable improvement in efficiency, quality, effectiveness, or economics of patient care delivery on a large scale.
Healthcare Innovation and Design Thinking