Julia Novik: “We Need to Bring Innovation into Our Healthcare System”

Julia Novik has worked in healthcare for over 12 years and has seen it from both hospital perspective, private industry, pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies as well as working with health technology companies.

“For the last 12 years I spent in health care a lot of the things I spent my time on was business development, how do we develop a new business model, whether it’s in a pharmaceutical company or whether it’s in the hospital in order to generate new services, new revenues and provide better patient care,” explains Julia Novik, Innovation Coach and Founder of Canada Health Net.

“Canada Health Net came in and assisted us with walking the process, identifying what was inefficient in our process, making sure that we were looking at the items that had the biggest impact on our service and addressing those items first,” says Edith Dell, MS CGC, Operations Manager.

Charanjit Singh (CJ) Bawa, Lean Coach in QCDMS Consultants describes his colleague, saying that Julia really know how to look at the 360 degree of an organization. “She will go into your existing processes, services, the way you do business. She thinks about how to get you guys out of the box and that’s one quality which is very important for an innovation coach who can actually look at your business from all the angles not only from one angle,” he continues.

“We start working with your frontline staff and management team, they start realizing ‘Wow look at all the waste or activities that we are doing on day-to-day which really just burden us and take away the time that we could have been spending with the patients.’ There is a continuous process on looking at those brainstorming ideas,” concludes Julia Novik.

She explains that the best ideas came from the people that were doing the work or from the customers who were the receivers of the product or service. “So you always want to consider how you create a funnel of those brainstorming ideas. You have to start from inside, you have to start with some of the small problems or issues that we can address not necessarily with huge investments, with maybe trying a small app here and there to address some of these very critical issues. So start small, it’s going to evolve but you need to start somewhere because innovation is all about taking action and stop talking about it.”