I had the opportunity to meet with Aneesh Chopra — our country’s first Chief Technology Officer — last week. The CTO serves as Associate Director of the Obama administration’s Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), which “serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans and programs of the Federal Government.” OSTP will also lead interagency efforts on a wide range of science and technology policy issues, certainly to include health information technology (HIT) in collaboration with David Blumenthal in the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT.

Chopra — whom I’ve known for years from our days together at the Advisory Board Company — is not only really sharp but very creative in thinking into the future about how technology can evolve. The opportunity is enormous, but capitalizing on it requires more than just technology development but policy planning as well. One could argue that the pace of technology advance over the last several decades arguably has outpaced our imagination, yet we haven’t harnessed those breakthroughs in the form of health care productivity or quality gains.

The New York Times Sunday Business section explored the government’s role in stimulating innovation yesterday. Steve Lohr cites Chopra’s interest in building “innovation platforms” to spur growth, but Lohr notes that there are at least nine countries that have been more aggressive than the U.S. in using government to drive innovation: Australia, Brazil, Britain, Chile, Colombia, Finland, India, Norway and Singapore.

The Center for Information Therapy (IxCenter) also has been focused recently on how stimulate more robust innovation in the field of information therapy (Ix). In some ways, this was a natural evolution of our partnership with Health 2.0, LLC, in preparing for the first-ever “Health 2.0 Meets Ix” conference we held two months ago. There, we explored (among other things) how innovative health 2.0 tools could be combined with Ix strategies to create new models for health care delivery.

We also have launched two collaborative projects with IDEO — the innovation design firm responsible for creating everything from the first Apple mouse to the Swiffer — in our search for rapid-cycle innovation in Ix strategies. Thanks to a grant from the California HealthCare Foundation, we will work with IDEO to develop Ix strategies to overcome barriers in implementing innovative consumer engagement strategies with safety-net populations in California. We will address text-messaging applications and other approaches to information prescribing.

Another experiment involves applying the IDEO model to Ix innovation design with our IxAction Alliance in its monthly webinar. In addition to trying to develop a robust model for Ix innovation design, we also are testing out whether we can apply the highly intensive in-person workshops and collective observation of users to the virtual and dispersed nature of our monthly IxInsights webinars. That has major policy planning implications in terms of the scalability and efficiency of how we stimulate innovation nationwide.

The IxCenter will be actively pursuing robust approaches Ix innovation design strategies over the coming months, and we’ll certainly be sharing everything we learn in this space. In the interim, it would be great to get suggestions and other input from readers on the best strategies for rapid-cycle, breakthrough innovation.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under Engaging Consumers, Health 2.0 Space, Innovation, Inside the Beltway, The New Health Care Consumer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.