With so much innovation happening in healthcare today, and hospitals creating innovation or transformation labs, some are even conducting Shark Tank-style initiatives to glean new ideas from the very people who will ultimately use the technology. Count NewYork-Presbyterian and Stony Brook Medicine among those.

It starts, as so many innovations do, with ideation and design.

Stony Brook Medicine CIO Gerald Kelly said undertaking a Shark Tank initiative highlighted how many resources the provider already has.

“The mentality of a Shark Tank is that it should be stated upfront what you measure and what you don’t,” Kelly said at the NODE Health Digital Medicine Conference in New York City on Thursday. “If were investing in innovation talent, we need to know what we’re going to get.”

That means it’s critical to understand the problem you’re working to solve and make sure everyone involved does as well.

“We have guidelines,” said NewYork-Presbyterian Director of Informatics Strategy Victoria Tiase. “The idea is to bring forward an idea that will give operational or clinical efficiencies to the staff. There are a ton of ideas out there; we look for common themes to move forward.”

It’s also important to determine who will own the project and who the sponsor is. When bringing in users, don’t forget about inviting upper management to the table.

Jitendra Barmecha, CIO at SBH Health System, said that every member of the senior management team has been required since about a year and a half ago to go into clinical areas to witness the problems, in anticipation that resolutions will come from interactions with end users.

“We have been getting a lot of information through this method,” Barmecha said. “We manage to get some very innovative ideas.”

And by design, because they come from clinicians, those innovations are more likely to be used in clinical settings — and that’s key to putting new or novel information to use, notably data generated by patients.

It’s never as simple as just rolling out a new app, however, so before getting to the deployment phase, Meg Barron, director of digital health strategy at the American Medical Association, said healthcare providers should manage the change by determining if a new tool will work in a health system's environment and with a particular care team.

That should include usability testing, incorporating design principles into the app, understanding intended outcomes and looking how to get clinicians data they need, Tiase added.

“It’s about needing to have crystallization of the problems you’re looking to solve up front,” AMA Barron said. “Get leadership and implementation teams involved.”  

Kelly also offered a tip about what to avoid when running a Shark Tank at your hospital.

“When we started a shark tank approach, the first time we almost brought somebody to tears,” Kelly said. “We were overly excited to be too much like the show. It can be shocking for people to come and hear about all the flaws.”