Grant: Project Grant

Health care organizations are being criticized for their low ability to adapt and improve at a sufficient pace to meet patients' needs and expectations. Recently, a new form of organization, namely Academic Health Centers (AHC), have emerged with promises of being incubators for innovation. Hence, bringing together three core components of education, research and delivery of care, these organizations are supposed to continuously improve their practices. These promised are also rooted in the digital revolution that is underway, where electronic data open new doors for learning about the actual outcomes of care. In Canada, huge investments have been made to create AHCs, but little is known on their actual ability to support innovation. This is where this project will make a contribution: by analysing what are the ingredients for AHC to become incubator for innovations in the Canadian health systems and ultimately to improve care. Our research is structured around three phases: 1) An exploratory study throughout all 17 AHC in Canada will be conducted to identify key innovations, and essential ingredients for their emergence and scaling up. Documents analysis on innovations, as well as interviews with CEO and key stakeholders will be performed. 2) Case studies will be conducted in purposefully selected sites to understand dynamics of innovation within these organizations. Various sources of data (e.g. internal reports, interview with key informants) will be used to analyze in-depth processes of innovation and their relationship with organizational and policy contexts. This phase will allow for the elaboration of critical pathways and identification of key ingredients for innovation in AHC. 3) These pathways and ingredients will be validated through a consensus with experts from Canada and other jurisdictions using a Delphi method. It will culminate in recommendations for policy makers and managers to increase the value proposition of AHC in Canada.