Case Study: The Hospital Innovation Unit Strategy |9
outcome of the project was the positive attention to the goals and innovation strategy underpinning this project. This positive image and profile for the executive team and industry partners emerging from the collaboration has resulted in all partners being perceived as innovators.
3. Engaging and Sustaining Staff Engagement The leadership team proactively engaged the staff union and made a compelling case highlighting the value of the project for both clinical staff and patient care outcomes. The union was assured that the leadership team was committed to maintaining the privacy of the clinical staff while implementing the technologies. This early engagement with the union was effective in garnering their support and paved the way for the clinical staff to actively engage in the project activities such as co-design of the integrated solution. The inability of the integrated technology solutions to meet staff expectations for desired functionality was detrimental to maintaining staff engagement and adoption of the technology as the project progressed. The Agile methodology selected, which used incremental development and testing sprints, proved to be ineffective in supporting the integration of the technology for application to clinical processes in the innovation unit.
4. Challenges with System Integration The project was plagued by technical integration challenges, largely related to the diverse types of technologies selected by the hospital, that were never designed to be integrated with other proprietary products. Each of the vendors had “stand-alone� technology products designed to be introduced into a clinical environment, independently of other technologies. This project attempted to integrate these various technologies, which proved to be so difficult that the integrated solution was never achieved. System integration with hospital infrastructure was not possible due to the inability to integrate the technologies.
5. Lack of Clearly Defined Goals The innovation strategy was not able to facilitate flexible and rapid deployment of innovative solutions as defined by the original project objectives. Failure to achieve the project outcomes was an important learning opportunity, which did help define how the innovation model could be redesigned to be more successful in future. Clear and wellscoped objectives, that are both achievable and measurable, could have contributed to the success of the project. For example, the required expertise and insights on the steering committee could have better informed decisions on how the technology interfaces could be integrated to create the desired integrated solution. Clearly defined goals and the necessary technological expertise to inform decisions would have supported the success of this project.
6. Selecting Appropriate Methodology The Agile development methodology was selected as the methodology of choice by the Hospital, based on its experience of LEAN methodologies, which had similar types of