Course Preview | Innovating Healthcare: A Strategic Approach from Emory Executive Education

Hello, I'm Professor Charlie Goetz. I'm not a physician nor a nurse, much less an administrator, but I have built nine successful businesses over 20 years, including building two healthcare businesses. I retired early so that I could give back, which for me includes teaching MBAs and PhD students, co-founding a healthcare non-profit in Africa, and being on the board of a nonprofit drug discovery company that created the antiviral for COVID. I've written three books, two on how to build new products and businesses, and one political thriller novel. My strengths are my creativity and innovation. I've been told that I'm really good at asking questions that drive value for businesses, management, customers, and patients. But I have plenty of weaknesses too. I couldn't read until I was in fifth grade, so my grammar and spelling wasn't always the best. I'm ADD and hyperactive and it causes me to sometimes talk very fast. Enough about me. Let's consider the type of questions you will have to consider as you craft solutions to help your healthcare organization innovate. How will your solution impact patients? What will be the impact of physicians and nursing staff within your organization? Will your solution impact the daily work on the non-clinical administrative support staff? Why should these groups buy into your idea? What is the value proposition for each of them? How will this solution impact your organization's relationship with your health plans, your staff, or other health systems in the region? How will your solution impact healthcare quality and improve outcome? What technology investment is required to implement your solutions? What internal and external regulatory stakeholders will you have to consult with or seek approval from as you guide your solutions from an idea to an approved project? Are there any legal concerns, HIPAA, the High-Tech Act, or the Stark Law? What are the financial impacts of your solution? Will your solution increase cost or require budget cuts?

So, let's talk about what I can do to help. During our time together, we'll cover tools you can use become more creative and how to use these tools and skills to ask better questions so that you can gain truly valuable information. We'll teach you how to leverage your creativity and obtain actionable information to think more innovatively so you can turn your new creative ideas into real life solutions. Then we will focus on the process of entrepreneurship or solving needs by building new products or services within your own organization. And then how you get your solutions into the real world so your customers, patients, and staff lives can all be better in some important way. Finally, we will leverage all of your new knowledge, tactics, and tools that you've learned and focus our attention on how they can all come together to solve both major and everyday problems. Creativity allows us to look at things in a new and different way. It opens our mind. It enables us to see what can be and how to solve difficult and often what appears to be unsolvable problems. Creativity gets your mind going, it boosts people's confidence and it's been shown to increase life expectancy. In addition, research shows that creative people are on average happier people as they no longer are confined to the status quo.