Joshua Liu

Last week I found myself in gorgeous Banff, Alberta, meeting with an esteemed group of physician leaders and healthcare innovators from across Canada. Together, we began laying the groundwork for transforming Canadian healthcare from an ecosystem of fragmented, local Inventions to a thriving ecosystem for scalable Innovation.

This was my first meeting as the Chair of the new Joule Innovation Council for the Canadian Medical Association (CMA). It is an honour and privilege to lead this Innovation Council for our national organization of 83,000 physicians across the country!

Our Innovation Council we will be guiding the CMA and Joule Innovation on a number of new programs to help Canadian physicians achieve scalable impact with their Healthcare Innovations:

• Grant Funding to help your innovation work progress faster
• Mentorship from physicians and innovators who have successfully gone from Ideation > Invention > Innovation in our complex healthcare system.
• Access to early-adopters and beta-testers

Most importantly, we will build a thriving community of physician innovators – and together we will learn from each other, fix the barriers that stifle innovation and build an innovation ecosystem that works for patients and providers, rather than against us.

If you are a Canadian physician, I encourage you to learn about the new programs Joule Innovation has to offer. And please reach out to myself and my Council peers on how we can help!

So why am I doing this?

Let me take you back five years ago to 2011.

After a transformational experience at UHN’s Centre for Innovation in Complex Care (now called OpenLab), I spent my final two years of medical school fascinated by the intersection of value-based care and technology to improve patient outcomes.

For the first time in history, there was both a Need and a Means to better engage patients outside the hospital/clinic, help them lead healthier lives and lower costs for the system.

I was excited about the possibilities.

BUT – during my training, I saw how Canada struggled with Healthcare Innovation.

In Canada, our brilliant minds are fantastic at coming up with great Ideas and working Inventions. However, far too often our Inventions stop at the local level (e.g. local success at one clinic, department or hospital) and never make it to broad scale Innovation (e.g. adoption by other clinics, departments or hospitals). [1]

Unfortunately, marred by misaligned financial incentives and other barriers, our healthcare system makes it difficult for physician innovators to go from local Invention to widespread Innovation.

At the end of the day, I cared most about Impact – if I were to do this, I wanted to make sure whatever I worked on would have a clear path to scale across the healthcare system.

Eventually, I decided that Entrepreneurship would be a more effective path. As an Entrepreneur, my desire for Impact would be completely aligned with the financial incentives of a Company. If our work did not scale across the healthcare system – well, we would be out of business! [2]

Fast forward to 3 years later, thanks to my wonderful team at SeamlessMD, I have experienced going from Ideation to Innovation in our healthcare system. It’s incredible to see healthcare providers using our platform to re-engineer perioperative care for all types of surgeries, in all types of hospitals and in more than one country.

Unfortunately, in Canada, my story as a physician going from Invention to Innovation is an outlier rather than the norm. When I meet other physicians trying to cross this chasm, far too often I see them making the same mistakes we did. More often than not, I worry about them – because of the way our healthcare system is designed, the cards are stacked against them.

So when an opportunity came up to be part of the solution – to dramatically improve the chances of physician innovators going from Idea to Innovation – it was a no-brainer.

I am bullish now more than ever about the future of healthcare innovation. Don’t get me wrong – we still face steep challenges. The financial incentives remain broken and we continue to sustain walls that slow the adoption of meaningful innovation.

But when you develop a community of individuals driven to build a better future, and equip them with the resources to do so – that’s when the Magic happens.

This is a first step towards having such a thriving community for Innovation in Canadian healthcare. Together we will build momentum and break down these barriers. And in the process, we will build a healthcare system that is better for all.

Once again, to my physician peers – I encourage you to take advantage of the resources the CMA and Joule has to offer, and to become a part of our growing community of physician innovators.

I can’t wait to experience the better healthcare system we will build together!

 

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[1] When I refer to Healthcare Innovation, I don’t just mean technology. I also mean new Models of Care, Healthcare Policies, etc. In fact, some of the most transformational Innovations in Healthcare are not technology-related (like this one).

[2] I don’t believe Entrepreneurship is the only way to achieve scalable Innovation in the healthcare system. In fact, there are many important Healthcare Innovations for which starting a company would be the least effective path for achieving Impact. That said, I still believe a company is the right vehicle for the work SeamlessMD is doing.