CROWDSOURCING HEALTHCARE LEVERAGING OPEN INNOVATION SOFTWARE TO SUPPORT THE
DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS
IDEASCALE
What appears to be a floating flower in a thin, red liquid could double for an exotic craft cocktail. What might be a cross-section of ripe fruit shows a ridged rind and a humble, pitted center that turns lazily in the glass. What it actually is, is a fungus sample that has traveled quite a long way to be in an Oklahoma laboratory.
What is even more exciting is that it might have cancer treatment possibilities, since extraction of the active chemicals from the sample revealed
a unique metabolite which was shown to have significant anti-tumor activity in laboratory tests. Yes, the team in this Oklahoma laboratory had discovered that this fungus cocktail had potential anti-cancer applications. But what is also more confounding is that the sample came from a previously-unknown citizen living in rural Alaska who responded to a call for fungus samples that might supplement the team’s study. Without that one contribution, the discovery might not have been sourced for several years to come since only a mere 7 percent of the 1.5 million+ species of the world’s fungi have yet been identified.
When asked about the experiment later, the scientists were excited about the potential applications of their discovery, but also about the possibilities of collaborating with citizen scientists through open innovation. "Many of the groundbreaking discoveries, theories, and applied research during the last two centuries were made by scientists operating from their own homes," Robert Cichewicz says. "Although much has changed, the idea that citizen scientists can still participate in research is a powerful means for reinvigorating the public's interest in science and making important discoveries.”1
And although Cichewicz is correct, the impact of open innovation in the field of healthcare and research is not limited to citizen science, but can also be the introduction of a new concept, idea, service, product, or process that improves diagnosis, treatment, information, outreach, prevention and knowledge gathering, and with the long term goals of improving safety, quality, outcomes, efficiency and costs. And those revelations to services, offerings, and the market as a whole can come from average citizens, specialized professionals, employees, and researchers from all around the globe with the help of open innovation.
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Buried In Alaskan Soil
Large organizations have used a wide variety of tools to collect ideas that solve complex, persistent, or emerging problems and issues in every field of healthcare and research.
The typical arrangement for leveraging organizational subject matter expertise to source resolutions is to dedicate cross-functional teams, working groups and conferences to sourcing these solutions. Of course, utilizing any one of these methods includes hidden challenges and costs:
travel, time, and huge levels of effort. Additionally, these solutions are only influenced by a small number of participants whose range of knowledge and resources might be further limited. The result is that effective outcomes are constrained by organizational roadblocks to innovation.
This is where many organizations have introduced the concept of open innovation or crowdsourcing in order to support innovation efforts at every level without being hampered by those typical challenges.
“Open innovation” is a term coined by Henry Chesbrough during the late 1990s to describe the practice of eliminating barriers to developing new intellectual property.
According to Chesbrough, “open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.”2
Essentially, the boundaries that once separated an organization from its broader network are becoming more penetrable. And boundaries that once separated departments are becoming permeable and everyone becomes part of the problem-solving process. This goes for citizen scientists who mail in their Alaskan soil samples, as well as transparently sharing individual knowledge in both qualitative and quantitative formats from within an organization.
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Healthcare and Open Innovation
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Not only does crowdsourcing or open innovation overcome resource barriers of geography, time, and team size, it also empowers organizational transparency, ongoing collaboration and optimization, and truly innovative thinking that is necessary to solving remarkably daunting and important problems.
But the real reason why the healthcare industry is truly best served by open innovation is that healthcare’s greatest asset is its network. In an industry which represents about $5.5 trillion or 8% of the global economy, it has one of the richest human systems of information in order to support its problem solving.3 The number of healthcare employees in the US alone numbers more than 17 million to say nothing of the vast network of patients and family that also hold potentially groundbreaking information and insight.4 These ideas can include new modes of diagnosis, new services for the treatment of disease, new discoveries, potential cost savings ideas, and much, much more.
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For these reasons, several managers in healthcare-related organizations have been utilizing crowdsourcing through cloud-based software as a service to provide a virtual venue to
streamline their ideation processes. Once gathered, the team can develop ideas and potential courses of action that solve these critical problems (diagnosis, treatment, cost savings, prevention, etc.) by refining the ideas from the crowd.
In particular, many have found the intuitive and user-friendly IdeaScale crowdsourcing platform to be effective in creating an iterative process to collect, refine, and review ideas from tailored participant groups. IdeaScale provides the following advantages:
• Facilitates inter- and intra-organizational collaboration • Streamlines the capture, review and adjudication of ideas and recommendations • Removes natural barriers to new ideas and encourages collaboration for their refinement • Reduces time required to elicit organization-wide feedback. • Standardized tools that can be used by all employees at every level, decreasing cost and time required to elicit ideas • A collection and vetting process naturally develops within an organization as a list of ideas that have been prioritized based on crowd input, team input, and expert input emerge.
There are several ways to use a crowdsourcing platform as an integral part of an innovation program, including establishing a formalized ideation process to encourage employees to submit problems and ideas, to obtain feedback from stakeholders and increase their participation, and to conduct challenges. The diversity of existing IdeaScale communities deployed at NIH and beyond demonstrates the flexibility of crowdsourcing in sourcing ideas, engaging employees, raising awareness, launching challenges, and more.
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IdeaScale and Healthcare
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The field of medicine is constantly making strides – changes so disruptive that outdated methods
and tools are rendered useless. When the data cultivated by numerous sources come together, it
quickens the pace of innovation – from creating new cutting edge technology to research and
diagnostic methods in countless focuses. Crowdsourcing empowers various organizations to
source new ideas and broaden the quality of research.
Featured Community:
Dialogue on
Nanotechnology in Cancer
The NCI Office of Cancer
Nanotechnology Research (OCNR) at
NIH used crowdsourcing to identify
nanotechnology-based materials and
devices that have the potential to
transform cancer research and clinical
oncology. The call went out to the public
who was encouraged to submit ideas on how to make cancer treatment more effective by
employing recent advances in nanotechnology and discussed possibilities in several
categories, including targeting, drug delivery, metastasis and circulating tumor cells, and
nanoinformatics among other topics. The ideas received were presented at a Strategic
Workshop on Cancer Nanotechnology and are being taken into consideration by OCNR.
• IdeaScale helped the organizations track the progress of the ideas from submission to completion during innovation events.
• IdeaScale allowed for global collaboration in problem solving with web traffic from more than 82 different countries all working together to answer the same questions.
• The selection of the best ideas were facilitated through community voting and feedback on ideas, ensuring that the most promising ideas were enhanced and prioritized.
• IdeaScale innovation experts can help organizations obtain better ideas and solutions by framing the innovation challenges, including the formulation of clear and specific challenge statements to maximize the chance that submitted ideas are actionable and useful to the organization.
EXPLORING CROWDSOURCING AND RISK
Crowdsourcing for Innovative Healthcare Ideas
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Crowdsourcing for Engaging Employees and Healthcare Providers
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Consulting with peers over diagnoses and treatments is standard practice among healthcare
professionals. Through crowdsourcing, the breadth of accessible knowledge grows as
professionals within an organization (or worldwide) share cases, ideas, and findings in order to
solve a range of problems and improve the work environment without boundaries.This has
happened in several leading organizations, including with a nursing initiative at NIH
Featured Community: Bayada Bright Ideas Forum
BAYADA Home Health Care is a trusted
leader in home health care—providing
home health care services to children
and adults of all ages in the comfort of
their own homes. In the fall of 2012,
BAYADA Chief Operating Officer Linda
Siessel challenged the organization to
find a solution for identifying and
gathering the innovative thinking that
was taking place in the 260 BAYADA service offices around the country. This is when they
introduced the IdeaScale Bright Idea Forum.
• IdeaScale helped the organizations track the progress of the ideas from submission to completion during innovation events.
• IdeaScale and Bayada engaged over 400 users that shared more than110 ideas, 730 comments, and 2000 votes (representing 100% participation)
• Produced companywide changes which include: new social media guidelines, employee classes, automated employee notification systems, open house program, and much more.
• IdeaScale offered a customizable interface to make the innovation site appealing to the users and maintain branding consistent with the organization hosting the innovation challenge
• The IdeaScale team can assist with generating interest and participation in the innovation campaigns by providing engagement support and best practices and helping define a launch strategy.
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Crowdsourcing has the added benefit of adding a new communications channel to various
audiences, including doctors, nurses, other health professionals and medical experts who
provide care in hospitals, doctor’s surgeries, nursing homes, and others. Each point of
connection is also an opportunity to engage and educate.
Featured Community: Cerebral Palsy Alliance
In 2012, Cerebral Palsy Alliance
introduced World Cerebral Palsy Day’s
“Change My World in One Minute”
challenge where people from around
the world could share ideas about how
to improve the lives of people living with
cerebral palsy. This was the first time
that the world community of 17 million
people with cerebral palsy had been
brought together to surface solutions to some of the many barriers that they face in their
lives and to dream of a different future.
• IdeaScale launch strategies could be used to publicize the innovation challenge to the general public for better participation, all the while reinforcing an integrated communication plan that includes social media coordination.
• IdeaScale supported a five-stage, year-long process that yielded one of the world’s first solar-powered wheelchairs for people living with Cerebral Palsy in areas of the world without access to consistent access to electricity.
• IdeaScale includes mobile access, through apps and mobile optimized user communities, to increase participation and enable integration of the challenge with other innovation initiatives or events.
Crowdsourcing for Raising Awareness
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IdeaScale can open challenges to the crowd at large or to exclusive communities of all sizes so
that responses are limited to employees or subscribers or any other specialized assembly in
order to create challenge-based innovation.
Featured Community: ONC Challenge
The Office of the National
Coordinator for Health Information
Technology (ONC) has conducted
challenges that are open to the public
using the IdeaScale platform. The
Digital Privacy Notice Challenge
sought to reward creators of online
versions of model notices of privacy
practices (NPP) that best convey the
required information to patients in an accessible format. This challenge was effective in
developing a patient friendly resource, as well as in enabling users to interact with the
proposed notices and identify the most effective approaches.
• The IdeaScale platform has enabled government agencies to hold competitions and challenges such as those authorized by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010.
• IdeaScale’s idea assessment tools make it possible to involve experts and panels at different stages of the innovation challenge to advance the best solutions.
• The IdeaScale team has experience in developing innovation challenge requirements, and can advise organizations on judging guidelines, prize amounts, and winner selection.
Conducting Challenges Using a Crowdsourcing Platform
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IdeaScale makes it possible for
organizations to efficiently collect large
number of ideas from diverse users to
arrive at the best idea. It is currently the
world’s largest crowdsourcing ideation
platform, supporting more than
4,000,000 users in more than 25,000
communities.
As the leading crowdsourcing vendor to
enterprises and governments since
2008, IdeaScale has become the
preferred innovation platform in both the
private and the public sector markets, with high profile government clients such as the Office of
the President, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Federal Communications
Commission, as well several Fortune 100 companies.
IdeaScale has built an extensive reputation for delivering solutions for diverse innovation
programs, ranging from citizen engagement, to employee ideation and open innovation initiatives.
The proven innovation methodology guides customers through all the phases of idea generation
and management to ensure a successful engagement.
• IdeaScale is experienced in making recommendations to diverse agencies on designing
innovation programs to achieve specific objectives and ensure optimized deployment of the
crowdsourcing platform.
• Strategic planning services available which include: design of the innovation initiative to
attract the desired user populations, enhanced accessibility, and incentive game systems to
increase participation and organizational subject matter expert facilitation.
• Comprehensive analysis and reporting tools quickly identify the most active ideas and
users, and continuously track key metrics on how well the innovation challenge is meeting
predefined program objectives.
Learn More About IdeaScale
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Establishing an innovation program that includes crowdsourcing technology to complement existing processes and subject matter experts can be valuable to any health program. A crowdsourcing platform provides access to all stakeholders to elicit new ideas for complex problems and engage your community in creating positive change. IdeaScale software makes crowdsourcing easy-to-implement, and the experienced IdeaScale team
will ensure that your innovation program is successful and delivers on your organization’s mission objectives. Together we can discover the best ideas to solve problems impacting healthcare today using the power of crowdsourcing technology and customized process facilitation.
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Conclusion
1. Bradley, David. "Crowdsourcing Drug Discovery:
Antitumour Compound Identified." - Ezine. Spectroscopy
NOW, 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 23 July 2014.
2. "Open Innovation." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05
July 2014. Web. 08 May 2014. <http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Open_innovation>.
3. Omachonu, Vincent K., and Norman G. Einspruch.
"Innovation in Healthcare Delivery Systems: A Conceptual
Framework." The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector
Innovation Journal 15.1 (2010): n. pag. Innovation.CC.
University of Miami, 2010. Web. 23 July 2014.
4. "Health Care Industry Statistics." Statistic Brain RSS. US
Census Bureau, 28 July 2013. Web. 21 July 2014.
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