Innovation is inevitable — but an organization's ability to harness innovation to succeed clinically and operationally never has been and never will be. This is the challenge healthcare leaders across all sectors face as we:

• Establish new infrastructure and alignment models to drive the transition from traditional care models to bespoke care models
• Grapple with the fact that 73% of U.S. adults are not satisfied with healthcare, even as the national health expenditure increased by over $1 trillion from 2017 to 2022
• Anticipate the human and economic burden of health disparities increasing to $1 trillion by 2040

Over the course of our two-day Clinical Innovation Summit, we discussed innovations across several therapeutic areas, highlighting imperatives for healthcare delivery leaders to harness innovation for their businesses and patients. Here are the five biggest takeaways from the summit: 

1. Innovations will continually change patient journeys

Successful organizations must develop the flexibility to deconstruct and reconstruct the patient journey in response to clinical, delivery, and payment innovations. In our panel discussions, we talked about how one of the key challenges to innovation in healthcare is that while leaders are often eager to add and build, they sometimes don't want to — or don't think to — take things away or stop doing things. 

In several conversations, attendees raised concerns about changing patient pathways. However, leveraging new tools like artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to reconstruct the patient journey can give the ability to mitigate issues and deliver superior care.

During the summit, Tatjana Kolevska, the medical director of Kaiser Permanente's National Cancer Excellence Program, shared that COVID-19 served as a catalyst for her and her colleagues to deliver top-notch virtual access to patients. This change not only improved patient satisfaction and access, but also allowed them to tailor care to prevent patients from receiving unnecessary treatment — all without requiring clinicians to make more than five clicks. 

2. Leaders need to look further ahead to protect investments  

The innovations of today are equal parts exciting and challenging, but as strategic leaders across the healthcare landscape grapple over delivery and financial changes, they risk investing in solutions with a short shelf life. 

This risk was most evident in discussions surrounding cell and gene therapy where major investments are taking shape in oncology centers, despite 80% of the pipeline including non-oncologic drugs. It's imperative to look ahead to protect the investments in specialty care.

3. Strategic plans need to be nimbler to account for market changes

In addition to being forward-looking, strategic plans for specialty care innovation and adoption need to be nimbler. Organizations need to monitor how innovation adoption varies across their markets and how policy, Medicare Advantage growth, and private equity create important inflection points. 

Scenario planning has never been more important in healthcare. During the summit, we stressed the importance of planning around a manageable number of vital inflection points, identifying no-regrets moves and investments, and ensuring that leaders are accounting for traditional and non-traditional stakeholders in their markets. 

This topic came up consistently in our conversation around ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs). There is no universal strategy for ASC adoption, but our research lays out the elements to help organizations do the necessary work of figuring out what role these care sites will play in their future identities. 

4. Clinical partnerships must be aligned on strategy 

Leaders need to acknowledge that while they can't harness innovation alone, they also can't do it with everyone. During the summit, Advisory Board's Solomon Banjo shared an example of a health system that audited its organization and discovered 90 clinical partnerships, with just as many questions around what those partnerships entailed, what resources were dedicated to them, and if they were still aligned with the organization's current strategy. 

In a panel moderated by Advisory Board's John League, Elliott Green, co-founder and CEO of Dandelion Health, and Ayo Ajaieyeoba, department VP of employer health solutions for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, spoke about how to make innovation real. One theme all three speakers emphasized was the importance of having a clear and meaningful problem statement to drive alignment and cooperation given the hard work of meaningful partnerships.

5.  Securing financing for innovations requires collaboration and creativity   

Organizations need to think outside the box about financing innovations. While treatment innovation moves quickly, payment transformation doesn't. This clash was evident in the conversations happening during the summit.  

In several instances, health system leaders shared examples of proactive approaches to bring innovations like gene therapies and GLP-1s to their patients and improve the business case for implementation of the latest treatments. Concepts ranged from early and active collaboration with payers to in-house drug manufacturing. The ideas sparked some of the most interesting cross-industry conversations throughout the summit, as self-insured providers, payers, and vendors jumped in to ask questions and offer ideas for collaboration.  

Want to learn more about how to navigate the exploding clinical innovation pipeline? Check out these resources:  

Truly personalized care is possible. Here's how to make it a reality.

4 imperatives for the future of healthcare innovation  

Exploring the potential of generative AI in healthcare

Scenario Planning Workshop Guide

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