Innovation Lifecycle Management: Innovation Diffusion Journey

Diffusion of innovation is a social process and a journey of organizational change involving a series of steps including back and forth iterative movements that occur as a result of evolved behavior and continuous learning about innovations. Healthcare leadership is important for the execution of the steps along the entire innovation diffusion journey of change to enable important facilitators and overcome implementation barriers. Healthcare leaders often use new evidence-based techniques for extending or improving health care through implementation of innovations at various steps of the organizational change – organizational change can be intra-organization that is within the staff members of a hospital or intra-organizational such as involving interactions between patients and hospital staff or between hospital staff and innovators/vendors.

Policymakers and healthcare executives are grappling with how to speed up this adoption of innovative healthcare advances, and understanding the entire diffusion process as journey steps can make the process simpler for implementation and performance monitoring. Research suggests that a lack of awareness among organizations about how to exploit innovation attributes, overcome barriers, effectively plan adoption, and manage essential organizational transformation is becoming a key concern. However, the characteristics of healthcare systems, institutional enablers of innovation, and frontline behaviors all have shown an impact on the pace and distribution of healthcare innovation, which leads to the more rapid diffusion of healthcare innovations and transformational system change. Even so, each diffusion journey starts at a different moment for each health system, based on the nature of the innovation, the number and kind of stakeholders engaged, and the health system’s features. There are typically the major obstacles hospitals have to overcome along the road which makes it extremely difficult to standardize the process. As a result, health systems must get a better knowledge of these elements that enable more systematic and rapid adoption of new policies, technologies, and practices to improve patient or community health outcomes, accessibility, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery. Treating the complex diffusion process as a journey of movements and steps makes it easier to solve the problems during implementation.