Disruptive Innovation – The key to integrated services?
Posted On 2011-11-24 22:07:44 By David CrookIntegration is at the heart of the government agenda for the NHS.
“It is clear the health service now needs to drive integration in a way that has simply never happened to date. In practice, current contracting processes, funding streams and financial pressures can actually discourage integration. There needs to be a service that both encourages innovation and supports collaboration. We also believe competition will play an important role driving change.” NHS Future Forum ‘Choice and Competition’ Report
As the report suggests this is nothing new, the emphasis may have changed to one of driving value, but integrated services have been sought after for as long as I can remember. Lord Laming’s 2003 report “Every Child Matters” sought better multi agency partnerships with improved process and information sharing. Yet with the failure of the monolith that was ContactPoint, coupled with the failure of NPfIT to allow us to connect, 11 years after the death of Victoria Climbie we are no further on. This is despite the e-commerce and social media revolution that allows far greater interaction between organisations, communities and individuals than has been possible before.
The hiatus of the Health Bill leaves us with no commissioning leadership to drive the integration agenda in the near future. In the meantime trusts maintain a silo approach to cost and service improvement that is manifest within individual departments, let alone working with partner organisations and agencies.
Is disruptive innovation or disruptive technology an opportunity to take integrated services forward? Are existing providers of services able to sustain innovation and take advantage of technology in a way that allows them to integrate services and achieve the significant cost and service improvements that are sought? Or are they too focused on the internal improvement drives that mean they have no bandwith to think beyond their organisational boundaries?
Disruptive innovation suggests new entrants to a market may be better placed to take advantage of technology and processes in a manner that disrupts the existing and creates a new market. Changes to the existing environment (personal health and social care budgets, choice of provider - private companies, social enterprises, the voluntary sector) coupled with the application of technologies offered by e-commerce and social media may well provide the impetus to change the health and social care market in ways not seen previously. Existing organisations may find themselves in a similar position that high street book and record shops find themselves with Amazon and iTunes, unless they find ways to develop and apply these technologies in innovative ways, and step beyond their inward looking focus on cost improvements.