Tomorrow’s Medicine brings you highlights from the SingHealth Quality & Innovation Day: Building a Better Tomorrow – Transforming Patient Care, 12 February 2015 at Academia.

DESIGNING BANK EXPERIENCES
Daniel Ling, Design Consultant, OCBC

Ask yourself this: Who has had a good or very good experience in a hospital or a bank?   Both industries need good design for customers.

Real results from design thinking in OCBC:
- Improved electronic banking application form made it easier for customers to understand the form and reduces the rejection rate due to error in filling from 22% to 1%.   It also saves $86,000 per year.
- Revamped OCBC website provides easy access to 3 most used functions on the home page and simplified the website experience for customers by reducing the number of links from 2,000 to 600. 

Key mind-sets:
1. Want the change badly – you need to see that there are gaps in the customer experience and processes
2. Start small, but start – gain trust and let people see your value
3. Love your customers – conduct customers interviews and walk in their shoes

THE CULTURE OF INNOVATION
Grace Choo, Country Head, Business Services Group and Corporate Branding & Strategy, 3M Singapore

Innovation culture is essential to innovation. It drives the purpose and belief in the organisation.

Creativity needs freedom. 3M is well-known to encourage employees to spend 15% of their working time on their own projects – to follow their own insights in problem-solving.

Share openly to work toward innovation. 3M used to produce overhead projectors.   When there was no more demand for it, they took the technical know-how from producing overhead projectors and use it to invent many other new products.

Innovation doesn’t happen by chance – It has to be planned and it has to be purposeful.   If you bring people together in a room often enough, collaboration will happen. But the occasion has to be deliberately organised.

3M McKnight principles:
- Necessary to delegate responsibility
- Mistakes will be made
- Essential that we have many people with initiative

Questions to ask about innovation:

SEIZING INNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES
Mr Fernando Erazo, Senior Director, Head of Philips Healthcare Hospital to Home in Asia Pacific

Innovation is about collaboration. But this does not mean everything has to happen in the physical space. Digitalisation is already a reality: connected care, sensing network, advanced analytics.

Three elements of transformation:
1. People (most critical, because there needs to be a base of trust between different stakeholders)
2. Technology
3. Process

Three lessons in innovations:
1. Seek partnership: ideas and implementation approaches come from participation, involvement, real concern for people.
2. Persevere: results are long term and diffused across many stakeholders, while pain is immediate and highly concentrated.   The pain is immediate but the benefits for the future are long-term!
3. Technology is foreseeable: it’s people and processes that primarily determine adoption of innovation.   Coming up with the technology is the easy part.   Getting them adopted is the difficult part.

“Everyone loves innovation; it’s the change they hate” - Dr Mike Breslow, eICU pioneer.