Process innovation

Why is process innovation so hard in healthcare? Is it indeed so hard in fact, or am I being a little harsh or unfair? Ladies and Gentlemen, for my one and only witness, I give you ….

Yes. Any industry where technology from 1980’s is still deployed daily some four decades later because it’s ‘more secure’ and ‘more official’, is definitionally an ecosystem highly successfully resistant to the diffusion of process innovation.

But, you say, isn’t healthcare resplendent with a constant cascade of innovative devices, therapies, drugs and biotech discoveries? Yes, but within a very narrow tools channel - tools to get ‘the job’ done  - to patients. The tools are wielded mostly by physicians to bring about change in the condition of patient-customers. Outside of this 'tools' channel, the process of healthcare, (with the ultimate paying customer squarely nowhere near the centre), adopts change at a glacial pace. Why so? More next time.