The word “entrepreneurship” brings to mind a fiercely independent individual who, through their own grit and initiative, can take an original idea and build it into a thriving and profitable concern.
“Intrapreneurship” is an organizational culture that springs from that same spirit of curiosity and confidence. The Henry Ford Innovation Institute is a commercialization arm of Henry Ford Health that actively helps clinicians, researchers and staff create scalable healthcare solutions within a resource-rich health system rather than outside of it.
It’s about physicians and other health professionals “using their creativity, subject matter expertise and the resources of their organization to innovate within a health system, hospital, university or practice setting,” explained Scott Dulchavsky, MD, PhD, who is CEO of the Henry Ford Innovation Institute. “Then, broadly scale those up to impact hundreds, thousands and even millions of patients.”
Henry Ford Health is part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
More than a century of innovation
To explain why Henry Ford Health has invested so heavily in organization-wide, physician-led innovation, “I’d have to go back more than 110 years,” said Dr. Dulchavsky.
Henry Ford himself established what would become Henry Ford Health in 1914, where Ford Motor Company engineers helped develop groundbreaking innovations such as the oxygen tent, heart and vascular procedures, and an early heart-lung machine.
“Henry Ford's greatest innovation was not a better car, but better ways to build a car,” Dr. Dulchavsky said. “It’s in our DNA to look at problems and ask, ‘How can we do things differently? How can we do things better?’"
Physicians, residents and medical students interested in health care entrepreneurship and business leadership should attend the AMA Physician Entrepreneur Forum, which will be held Aug. 7–8 at the AMA headquarters in Chicago. The event will feature health care leaders who have built successful businesses, practices and ventures. Learn more and register now.
Back at Henry Ford Health, innovation and input are not limited to physicians, researchers or executives. Front-line employees throughout the organization, including nurses and nonclinical workers, often identify practical inefficiencies and workflow problems, and how to address them, because they experience them directly every day.
“It goes back to enabling people to think of themselves as valuable innovators,” Dr. Dulchavsky said. “We're all creative people here and that creativity has value that can improve care far beyond the walls of any one clinic or hospital.”
The challenge is directing that creativity towards developing meaningful improvements, in a genuine culture of innovation in which employees understand that even relatively small changes can have a big impact on making work more efficient, effective or engaging.
Turning clinical insight into scalable solutions
Innovators at Henry Ford Health don’t have to leave medicine to launch a new endeavor. Physicians remain in clinical practice while collaborating with experts in business, intellectual property, information technology, regulation and commercialization to determine what is feasible, and scalable, to improve care beyond a single department or institution.
“Most physicians will not be the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company,” Dr. Dulchavsky said. “But they know the problems that affect healthcare today. That alone may not suggest a global solution, but it can help move the ball down the field, and that’s valuable.”
Successful innovation demands persistence, willingness to accept criticism, and that even the most promising ideas fail early and often.
“Edison failed thousands of times in the process of inventing the light bulb,” Dr. Dulchavsky said. “It takes tough skin to accept that you don’t have all the answers. But when someone has a truly transformative idea, and iteration No. 1 through No. 100 fail miserably, perseverance and partnerships will still pay off.”
From AI implementation to digital health adoption and EHR usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors. That includes recently launching the AMA Center for Digital Health and AI to give physicians a powerful voice in shaping how AI and other digital tools are harnessed to improve the patient and clinician experience.
The best ideas are built to scale
Deep understanding of clinical, procedural and organizational problems is one thing. Developing solutions, implementing them and bringing them to scale is another. The goal is not to simply generate ideas, but refine them into solutions that clinicians will actually use because they improve workflows without adding complexity.
Not every idea generated within the system is intended to become a commercially viable product. Some innovations are more incremental, focusing instead on reducing inefficiencies or making daily work easier. Even modest changes can drive real operational value when adopted across a large health system.
Successful innovators know the difference between isolated problems and those with broader relevance throughout healthcare. The strongest ideas are scalable solutions that can be adapted across specialties, departments or entirely different care settings.
“Pick a great problem, pick great partners, and pick people who will pull the idea apart,” Dr. Dulchavsky advised. “Those naysayers will help sharpen the idea. And then get help from experts in that area.”
Most importantly, Dr. Dulchavsky added, “Fail fast and fail frequently. After all, you don’t score any points if you don’t take a shot at the net first.”
