During the pandemic, many large Dutch hospitals faced the challenge of how to improve contact with their patients. The solution consisted of digitization and knowledge transfer. 

Setting up the right team

Every successful innovation starts with building a winning team. A hospital is a complex organization, which made Marieke, with her experience in change management, the perfect facilitator to take the lead on the project. 

To accelerate innovation, it is very important to involve employees of the hospital and use their knowledge of the organization. For example, we involved operational specialists from different outpatient departments such as "cardiovascular center" and the "general practitioners service. Also, in varying composition, specialists from the internal innovation lab within the hospital joined in order to achieve pragmatic innovations faster.

Knowledge transfer was central: show, do together, do yourself. In this way, we not only provided a solution, but also secured the knowledge in the organization so that they can solve future problems using the same process. 

Validated solution

Through a series of focus sprints, we were able to get to the core of the problem and substantiate it with data. After this, we were able to work with our multidisciplinary team in a focused manner on a solution that we validated with real end-users. After a series of small-scale tests, it was time to scale-up and transfer within the organization. 

The key lesson: With the right team, small-scale testing and validation, we were able to quickly arrive at a solution that we were certain in advance would solve the problem. 

Impact

The impact we made was better accessibility for patients to the outpatient clinics through digitization and standardization of internal processes. This freed up more time in the outpatient clinics to provide better care to patients.

Finally, to secure the new innovation process within the hospital, we used our Online Academy, which allows each employee to refer back to exercises and processes that made the sprints so successful.