Professor the Lord Darzi of Denham, PC, KBE, FRS Greg Parston, PhD and Julie McQueen
This report strives to gather “know-hows” in the process of facilitating more effective health models in their societies by assuring the participation of influential stakeholders who tirelessly work on the improvement of their health systems.
Policymakers and healthcare leaders around the world are wrestling with the problem of how to accelerate the take-up of new healthcare innovations. Although a great deal of research has been done on the topic of innovation diffusion, there is still insufficient understanding of how organizations can exploit innovation attributes, address the barriers, effectively plan adoption, and manage necessary organizational change.
This latest research – part of the ongoing GDHI study – seeks to deepen our understanding of the factors that can facilitate more systematic and rapid uptake of new policies, products and practices to improve patient or community health outcomes, accessibility, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of care delivery. It aims to build on the initial learning about the GDHI framework that identified three levels of influence on the pace and spread of the diffusion of healthcare innovation: healthcare systems’ characteristics; institutional enablers of innovation; and frontline behaviors. We hope to better understand how health systems can harness the enablers and foster the frontline behaviors identified in our earlier work, to more rapidly diffuse healthcare innovations and drive transformational system change.
Using a case study approach, we investigated eight successful examples of rapid innovation diffusion. We wanted to gain the perspective of policymakers, health system leaders, clinicians and other professionals inside health systems that have effectively managed the adoption and diffusion process for a specific innovation and to learn from their good practices.