Should Hospitals Be Engines of Economic Development?

I was absolutely intrigued by this Wired article by Mark E. Coticchia, Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer of the Henry Ford Health System, titled Hospitals as Engines of Economic Development. In the article, Mark makes the case for the value that a hospital provides its community and the added value they could create as an economic engine by leveraging the know-how and knowledge of its clinicians. Here’s a small quote from the article about how he thinks this should happen:

Medical and administrative know-how and inventions are positively impacting patient care, patient costs and hospital revenue. Yet almost all of the formalized programs to transfer technology to patient bedsides are within major academic medical centers not at the thousands of community hospitals nationwide, many of which have become or are looking to become part of a larger health care system through acquisitions, mergers and affiliation arrangements.

We need to have technology commercialization expertise available to more hospitals. This includes health care systems expanding their technology commercialization functions to their affiliated community hospitals. Alternatively, I anticipate that certain hospitals with substantial technology commercialization capabilities will offer their services to other hospitals with which they aren’t affiliated.

Obviously, Mark is a bit biased since he comes from a large health system. However, he is right that these smaller community hospitals are a place of untapped potential. In many ways it makes sense for these untapped community hospitals to leverage the technology commercialization expertise of these larger hospital systems. Those are things that the community hospital could likely never afford to create. Sounds like a great win win to me.

The real challenge I have with this idea is that it will take more than a partnership to extract value from these community hospitals. The problem with many of the community hospitals is that they haven’t ever had a culture of commercialization. Many of the doctors at these community hospitals will have to have a shift in mentality for this type of partnership to really work. Commercializing an idea isn’t something that most community hospital doctors have thought about doing. This mentality would need to be changed for a partnership like this to be a success.

What do you think of this idea? Is it a good one? Are hospitals an engine of economic development for their communities? Could they be if they’re not today? Should hospitals be pursuing these commercialization efforts?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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