When it comes to health care service delivery, patients, consumers, and healthcare professionals are asking for improved results, i.e. better access, more convenience, faster diagnosis and treatment, greater sensitivity to cultural differences and health disparities, and so on. But if we continue to do what we’ve always done, we will get the results we have always gotten. It isn’t enough to merely pursue activities as they are. The challenges we face today call for more focus on our approach—in other words, conscious innovation! Dr. Jagdish Chaturvedi, an ENT Surgeon, Innovator and Author has chosen to innovate, learn and create an impact in his youth, while most modern day youth while their time away. In an interview with him, he talks about 3 important steps that helps you to reach where you want while innovating in the healthcare sector.

Understand Problem First, Invent Later

Majority of the inventions we see come from the “Why can’t I?” place – that angry, frustrated voice that questions your discomfort, or blind acceptance. Why can’t I meet a doctor faster? Why do I have to wait in a queue for so long? Why do I have to pay so much to treat my sickness? Identifying the problem makes it easier to innovate – the root cause of any problem will always lead the way for a new invention to fall in place. Often entrepreneurs start their journey from the perspective of the solution and not the problem. When you innovate and your mind is locked on a specific solution, you have an incredibly hard time to change or pivot as you anchored your solution. Only if you start with the problem first and are skeptic toward the way it is solved, can you easily change or pivot. Fall in love with the problem you have chosen to solve and not the solution itself. Only then will you be able to passionately create the impact that you wish to see and you will smartly avoid the risk of building a solution which is then looking out for a problem to solve.

Create Team First, Invent Later

You might have wonderful ideas revolving around that head of yours, but two heads are always better than one. Innovation projects are said to fail 90% of the time. Why is this? Research shows that part of the answer lies in the special “innovation teams” who come together to find breakthrough growth in large corporations. Setting these teams up for success is vital, yet corporations often fail when doing this because they are so focused on the invention, rather than the intelligence. You need to build a team that can come up with a new revenue-generating business idea and take it all the way from concept to launch. You’ve got a serious challenge on your hands but the people you bring together should be ones who would stick with you and your idea till the change happens. It isn’t enough that you think ‘outside the box, the idea is to bring together a team that has the right configuration such that a ‘bigger and brighter box’ is unleashed.

Stick With The Team Passionately Till The End

There is no doubt that for any innovation team to be successful, you need to be fully committed to the team all the way- from the idea stage to the market.  You need to jump with both feet in and not “one foot in, one foot out.” Know where you are in the innovation game, where you want to go, and stick to your team through thick and thin. It’s difficult to describe how awful it is when you lose interest in something you’ve started because sometimes people just leave halfway. You need to keep your thoughts, energy and your team fully focused on the work at hand because the healthcare sector, unlike other sectors involves human lives. Making human lives and healthcare better is the need of the hour. Innovation is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity. The power to innovate lies within each one of us, we only have to look deep within…and enable as required.