By Cecilia Nasmith
Northumberland Hills Hospital President and Chief Executive Officer Susan Walsh said at this year's annual general meeting that their new NICE idea is in the early stages – stay tuned for big news on that front at next year's AGM.
NICE is the brainchild of Walsh and Chief of Staff Dr. Mukesh Bhargava, who explained what's behind (and ahead for) the Non-urban Innovation and Collaborative Effort.
The term non-urban is a response to the tendency to think of a hospital as either urban or rural, Dr. Bhargava explained, when NHH is neither.
As for the story behind the I and the C of that acronym, he continued, “In health care, we use a lot of innovation, but we don't embrace it fast enough,” citing the X-ray machine as an example – a great piece of innovation for diagnosing kidney stones and broken bones, but largely unused the first 16 years it was in hospitals.
He shared the old African saying, “If you want to do something fast, you can do it alone. But if you want to do something big, you do it together.”
Along with education, he continued, health care is one area where the world needs more innovation.
NICE grew out of the wish he and Walsh shared to bring more innovation to bear in both their roles, and began about a year ago as a conversation with a relative of Dr. Bhargava's who is a former head of creative design at Ikea.
Sanjay Bhargava became the first in a chain of distinguished people putting them in touch with other key people (including a former curator of the Nobel Prize museum and representatives of Toronto Metropolitan University and Trillium Health Partners). Meetings with representatives of Queen's University and Loyalist College ensued, along with members of the community with an interest in moving innovation forward.
They continue the search for people with a track record for innovation to further the project. While they are unsure of their next steps, they have some promising prospects. For example, Toronto Metropolitan University has agreed to facilitate a community-wide design/think exercise aimed at recruitment.
They also want to create a platform “where you can be an influencer, you can be an entrepreneur, you can be a tool, you can be a person who has a problem, you can be a person who wants to solve a problem, you can be a donor and you can participate in that,” Dr. Bhargava said.
There may even be a role for AI in this. He recounted applying for a particular grant.
“What problem in hospitals solve – and if you can come up with an idea, we will fund it up to $1-million.
“We did not get it, but we got an idea. It showed us, in our neck of the woods, people are interested in pursuing this.”
