People, not platforms, drive healthcare innovation

At the recent CHIME Innovation virtual summit on data, AI, and digital transformation, the most innovative insight had nothing to do with algorithms or architecture. Instead, speaker after speaker drove home a singular, urgent message: The future of healthcare innovation depends not on acquiring the right technology, but on developing the right people.

From keynote to closing panel, CHIME’s December 2024 Innovation Virtual Summit, Health Reimagined: Data, AI, and Leadership Driving the Next Era of Care, revealed a fundamental shift in how leading healthcare organizations approach transformation. In many ways, technology has become table stakes — ambient AI, predictive analytics, interoperability platforms are all available for purchase. The differentiator is whether your workforce can imagine, implement, and sustain the transformational change these tools enable. And that capability, it turns out, can be systematically built.

Innovation Is 70% learned … and teachable

CHIME Board Chair Tressa Springmann, SVP and CIDO at LifeBridge Health, opened the summit by dismantling a persistent myth that innovation is an innate gift possessed by a select few. Drawing on research by the late Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen, she shared that while IQ is 85% genetic, innovation is only 30% genetic, so 70% is learned skill.

This reframing means healthcare organizations aren’t at the mercy of whether they can recruit “innovative thinkers.” They can systematically develop innovation competencies across their entire workforce.

Springmann outlined Christensen’s Five Discovery Skills framework — associative thinking, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting — and made a compelling case that healthcare IT leaders are uniquely positioned to excel at these.

“We have a unique ability to see things across our entire organization that others don’t see,” she explained. “We spend time with finance. We spend time with respiratory therapy. We’re talking to nursing, to dietary. We’re able to connect dots through associative thinking that perhaps other individuals in the organization can’t see.”

The implication? Innovation isn’t something that happens to IT but rather something IT leaders are structurally positioned to lead, provided they actively cultivate these skills in themselves and their teams.

No technology decision happens in an IT vacuum

This people-first philosophy became even more explicit in the summit’s panel discussions. In the session on scaling generative AI, panelists articulated what might be the most important governance rule in healthcare technology today: No clinician name equals no “go live”.

Every AI tool, every new workflow, every digital initiative must have a clinical champion who owns it, validates it, and advocates for it. Not a token reviewer who rubber-stamps IT decisions, but a genuine owner from operations who sees the problem being solved and will ensure the solution works in practice.

This principle extended across all three panels. In the discussion on transitioning from sick care to well care, leaders emphasized that the whole C-suite owns this transformation, not just IT. Clinical, operational, and financial leaders must jointly own KPIs and their associated incentive models.

The underlying message is clear: technology is an enabler, not a solution. Without the right people owning the change, even the most sophisticated tools fail. This means people who understand workflows, patient needs, and organizational culture. As panelist Ryan Thousand, CIO of Dahl Memorial Healthcare Association, put it bluntly, “The quickest way to kill adoption on anything you do is to skip change management.”

‘Three hugs for every shove’: Building teams that can sustain innovation

If innovation is learnable and requires clinical partnership, then building resilient teams capable of continuous learning becomes the strategic imperative. The summit’s final panel tackled this directly, with Aaron Miri, CDIO of Baptist Health, offering a leadership philosophy that captured the room: “Three hugs for every shove.”

The principle is about balancing support with accountability. When team members struggle with new technologies or changing expectations, leaders should make three genuine attempts to help, such as providing training, resources, mentorship, and adjusted approaches. Only after demonstrating that investment should leaders have the crucial conversation about whether this is the right fit.

This is strategic, not soft management. Healthcare IT is facing unprecedented workforce challenges, including emerging technologies requiring new skills, generational shifts in employee expectations, and a mobile workforce competing globally rather than locally. Organizations can’t simply hire their way out of these challenges. They must develop their existing people.

Panelists shared concrete approaches:

• Personalized development plans that ask each team member “What’s your next upgrade?” This encompasses both technical skills and personal goals like running a marathon.
• Reskilling programs that identify needed certifications and fund employees to earn them over six months.
• Protected time for improvement work that signals innovation isn’t extra, but embedded in how teams operate.

Critically, this development focus extends beyond technical skills. Leaders discussed the importance of psychological safety, creating environments where failures are shared transparently as learning opportunities, where near misses are celebrated rather than punished, and where leaders model humility by openly acknowledging when their decisions don’t pan out.

“No one comes to work wanting to drop the ball,” said panelist Laurie Wheeler, COO of IS/IT for MultiCare Health system noted. When things go wrong, conduct root cause analysis without blame.

What ‘people first’ means for healthcare IT leaders

The summit’s “people first” message arrives at a moment when healthcare organizations are making significant technology investments, particularly in AI. The risks are obvious: Buying expensive tools that sit unused because the workforce wasn’t prepared to adopt them or implementing solutions that fail because clinical staff weren’t genuinely involved in design.

The solution the summit’s speakers propose is equally obvious but often overlooked: invest as much in your people as in your platforms.

This could be:

1. Teaching innovation systematically through frameworks like Christensen’s Five Discovery Skills – Creating contexts where questioning, observing, and experimenting are encouraged rather than seen as threats to established processes.
2. Requiring clinical ownership for every technology initiative – Refusing to deploy solutions that lack a named clinical champion who genuinely owns the outcome.
3. Developing existing workforce before looking externally – Implementing structured reskilling programs that give people the training, time, and support needed to adapt to emerging technologies.
4. Creating psychological safety where experimentation is expected – Failures are learning opportunities, and teams feel secure enough to surface problems early rather than hiding them until they become crises.
5. Balancing support with accountability through approaches like “three hugs for every shove.” – Maintaining high standards while genuinely investing in employee success.

The true innovation moment

Perhaps the most striking moment in the summit came when a panelist noted that most people in healthcare IT chose this field because they’re drawn to both mission and technology; they want to innovate. They’re hungry, not resistant to change, provided they have the support, skills, and psychological safety to engage.

This insight reframes everything. If your organization is struggling to adopt new technologies or scale innovation, the limiting factor is likely whether you’ve created the conditions for innovation to flourish: systematic skill development, genuine clinical partnership, robust workforce investment, and cultural psychological safety,

Information on specific AI use cases or population health platforms are a big part of the value of CHIME Innovation events, but the real “Ah ha!” moment of this virtual summit was the recognition that sustainable transformation requires investing in the innovative capacity of people across the organization: teaching them, empowering them, supporting them, and trusting them to co-create solutions.

Because at the end of the day, technology executes, but people innovate.