How to Bring Innovation into Healthcare

For the last 12 years Julia Novik, Innovation Coach and Founder of Canada Health Net, spent in health care and a lot of the things she spent her 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.

“In last 3 years I spent a lot of my time at MaRS Discovery District, many of you are familiar with MaRS. MaRS is one of the largest innovation incubators globally. In fact, in the last couple of years they’ve grown with a lot of international companies from most innovative regions of the world, from Scandinavian countries, from Israel, where a lot of innovations happen,” says Julia Novik. “And so what I did at MaRS, was I actually joined one of the startups, and for 2 years I spent my time being the Head of business development for a completely new breakthrough product in personalized medicine. The reason I’ve connected my experience to Lean is because I’ve learnt that there were a lot of stumbling blocks, lot of road blocks that I was getting when we were trying to commercialize the product and working with large corporations. As we didn’t have really a structure to follow, we didn’t have any backbone to say ‘Okay, this is what kind of different tools and principles you can apply with your organizations that you work with.’ And so that’s why I came to the conclusion and initiated movement in healthcare around Lean.”

Julia started a company called Canada Health Net. The main focus of Canada Health Net is to help health technology innovators to bring their technologies into the healthcare organizations and to the healthcare industry. “We have to look at what are the different problems from inside those organizations first to really understand what type of solutions or technologies they may require,” Julia says.

“Because what I found when I was working in a startup was: we had a great product, we knew that we could help people with better medication management with this technology, but I didn’t realize that we never really went to the stakeholders in those companies and did problem statement on their end,” she continues. “Working with the founder of the startup was about his scientific innovation which was the excitement why we decided that everybody needs this product.”

She explains that they did a lot of projects and this was where she saw that innovation needs to start from inside the organization: “We need to first figure out where were the problems before we can move to ‘I need this solution’ or ‘I need that solution’.”

“So basically what I’ve done was I’ve started doing a lot of Lean initiatives in healthcare,” she concludes. “What I’ve realized is I needed strong Lean structure background around Lean and I’ve joined forces with CJ from QCDMS. We are now working as one company and what we do is we take exchange experiences and I’m seeing tons and tons of innovation needs as well as Lean implementation projects that we end up finding in other sectors as well, some of them are service sectors, some of them are manufacturing sectors.”