Digital Innovation Lights the Fuse for Better Health Care Outcomes

Health care is among the many industries undergoing transformation as a result of the explosion of digital technologies. Cardinal Health Inc., a global, integrated health care services and products company, responded to the digital challenge by establishing a new innovation center in 2014 called Fuse. Located near the company’s corporate headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, Fuse is built around cross-functional teams, which means that Cardinal Health’s biomedical engineers, designers, and scientists collaborate with its patient-facing health care providers and even patients themselves to develop and test ideas about how to better meet health care needs.

Fuse’s cocreator and current leader Brent Stutz, Cardinal Health’s senior vice president of commercial technologies, sat down with MIT Sloan Management Review’s guest editor for the Digital Business Initiative, Gerald C. Kane, to talk about how the company uses its innovation process to improve Cardinal Health customers’ experiences and outcomes.

Before Fuse existed, the commercial technology solution existed; it just didn’t have this innovation arm to help incubate new ideas. Is that fair to say?

There were some existing commercial technology solutions, but they were intermixed amongst enterprise IT systems. Three years ago, the senior leadership team realized that building health care IT solutions for our customers is very different than running large warehouse management systems. The CEO of the [company’s] Pharmaceutical segment came up with the idea for Fuse, and I was tapped to build the commercial technology platform as well as the Fuse facility.

Can you walk me through the life cycle of one of these ideas?

Ideas come from both customers and our business. Fuse uses some techniques from Lean startups, and some that mirror the Google one-week sprint process. We sprinkle in some design thinking and user experience mock-ups throughout the process. I take the responsibility of funding the idea through our R&D mechanisms, and then I’ll partner with a business unit to land in. The actual marketing, sales, and care would move into a business unit after it reaches MVP [minimum viable product].

Our innovation process has three phases: explore, experiment, and then pilot. We have an opportunity to pull the plug at any time, so we kill and archive projects frequently. I’m not afraid to try 42 things and only have six make it out the other end. The sooner we stop working on an idea that isn’t panning out, the faster we can move on to the next, better solution.

How do they measure the success of Fuse?

We’re measured by the ideas we push through and the value we create. I have what I would call “innovation accounting.” I keep track of everything that’s been incubated, pushed into the business, and the value driven from that. I’m focused on ensuring we have some winners that continue to drive success. That incentivizes me to stay close to the projects and keep track of their value.

I suspect that not every engineer and not every health care talent would thrive in a Fuse-type environment. What are the skills or qualities you’re looking for?

They need to be curious. They need to be a learner. And there’s an aspect of empathy required. They need to be able to listen to someone else’s idea or understand a new perspective to solve a problem. It’s not about the smartest person in the room – it’s the person who is going to be the team player and bring a genuine passion and energy for solving big problems.

We also have this process called “spark.” We allot a few hours for employees to brainstorm technology and health care problems outside of the project they’re working on. For example, right now we’re brainstorming augmented reality, virtual reality, and chatbots. If the employees come up with something, they can actually request a “spark grant,” which would allow them to devote more time to it. We think these unique approaches help drive that continual learning, inquisitiveness and curiosity.

What have you learned over three years with Fuse? Are there challenges you’ve faced, or exciting success stories?

We’ve launched several solutions that were incubated through Fuse and are now driving value for our customers. One example is medication synchronization. Patients who have multiple prescriptions to refill would sometimes have to return to the pharmacy several times a month if their prescriptions didn’t align on the same refill date. Our medication synchronization solutions allow them to come into their pharmacy once a month to pick up all their prescriptions, and have more of a consultative relationship with their pharmacist. It also allows the pharmacy to streamline inventory and focus more attention on patient care.

Another solution we supported is medication reconciliation. Patients throughout the care continuum don’t have much medication reconciliation. This is essentially: when a patient leaves the hospital and goes home, how do they manage their medications? What medications were they taking before they went into the hospital? What are they taking now? What should they continue to take? Our technology-driven solution enables pharmacists to become very prescriptive with directions for the patients. This is important to improve medication adherence and improve patient outcomes.

What exactly is driving excitement and helping employees to see the potential change that you can deliver to the patient?

Those couple of success stories I mentioned drive excitement. At one conference, we started signing up retail independents to begin medication synchronization for their customers — because it drives better outcomes, better adherence, and it actually drives better inventory turns for them because they know Sally’s coming in on the 12th of every month to pick up these seven meds.

We also have a platform called OutcomesMTM, which has relationships with more than 40 payers and approximately 50,000 pharmacies to do medication therapy management, targeted medical reviews and comprehensive medical reviews. So, think about it as targeted interventions to specific patients that need additional consultation/services.

By taking that same product and presenting it to our large payers as an opportunity to drive adherence, we were able to get medication synchronization out to thousands of pharmacists in one fell swoop because we plugged it into that big digital platform. People are starting to get excited about Cardinal Health’s digital ecosystem.

It sounds like you’re saying they’re excited about what the digital innovations are doing, not the digital innovations themselves.

Correct. I think Cardinal Health employees are starting to think of innovation opportunities on that digital plane, rather than a physical plane of how to get boxes to someone faster. We can do a lot with the touch points in the health care ecosystem on the digital plane.

How do you enable your employees to immerse themselves in the outer network?

In some cases, we go to a clinic to observe, ask questions, and hold a one-week sprint at their facility. The other day, one of our Fusers was in scrubs because he got invited to shadow a local hospital customer. So, it’s not just bringing people into Fuse; it’s getting out and observing our customers as well.

An engineer needs to be able to close his eyes, visualize the workflow at that clinic or that pharmacy, and understand how the drugs come out of the cabinet, into the compounding room, and then over into the infusion suite. They need to be able to see the patients with a caregiver in a waiting room, or the nurses celebrating the end of a patient’s chemo. You see all that when you’re in there, and I want the engineers to have that understanding and empathy to support the work they’re doing every day at Fuse. It’s important.

I think about collaboration among employees and within organization silos. Yet, it sounds like when you talk about collaboration, you’re talking about with customers, partners, engineers, employees, and basically everybody who touches your product at various places.

I talk to our strategy and marketing teams almost daily; we have a massive amount of internal collaboration. But I honestly think our most important collaboration is with the customers. When you come to Fuse and walk through the glass doors into the back working area, you have to leave your badge, business unit, and title behind. We completely focus on our customer. It’s about solving problems.

We continually learn and strive to stay one step ahead of the health care industry. We have a lot of community outreach, such as patient-centered educational events or an evening with industry luminaries. These opportunities give us all a chance to think through health care problems facing our community and better identify how we solve them together.