SPARC – Designing Better Healthcare
I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Alan Duncan, Director of the SPARC Innovation Lab at the Mayo Clinic a couple of weeks ago. For those unfamiliar, SPARC, which stands for See, Plan, Act, Refine, and Communicate, was created to generate a new set of ways to meet the needs of patients.
Dr. Duncan and his colleagues are essentially running a live experiment at SPARC which is conveniently located in the heart of one of Mayo’s clinical care facilities. [Sort of an in-the-box approach to innovation.]
In fact, the more I think about it, the innovations SPARC is achieving hail from smack-dab in the middle of the box—within the confines of a real, working clinical practice, with real patients, real doctors and a few mindful observers capturing those unmet needs of the patient.
It’s not a focus group, it’s not role-playing. The lab is isolated enough to give it flexibility for rapid, on-the-fly observation and experimentation but integrated enough to gather instant feedback and provide immediate results to the entire Mayo Clinic.
Basically, SPARC’s methodology looks at the patient process, clinical process and innovation process all at once. This seemingly unnatural approach led me to ask Dr. Duncan how he manages the expectations of the patient with the successes and failures of experimentation. [After all, this is the Mayo Clinic we’re talking about – a renowned place of excellence. Do I really want to be a guinea pig?]
Dr. Duncan said that conceptually, during the planning stages of SPARC, he and his team were very cognizant of this ostensibly conflicting relationship. And they have installed certain patient protocols to help guide the experimentation process. But surprisingly, [or maybe not] once they started rolling, it wasn’t so much of an issue. And here’s the best part, the early curiosity the program generated on the part of its patients is converting over to patient enthusiasm in contributing to help fix the system.
Just how important is the ability to run a live experiment? Early innovation results are encouraging. One of their first successes came via a self-serve check-in system developed for patients to use to announce their arrival at the clinic. It became so popular that the service is being rolled out throughout Mayo's operations.
So what other industries might allow for this type of real-time experimentation? It would seem to me that if patients of the Mayo Clinic, with real health issues, are willing to forgo some measure of expectation for the betterment of healthcare delivery, where wouldn’t a live experiment work?
Posted January 24, 2006 02:56 PM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
