Texas A&M Architecture For Health
Invention, Inquiry, or Innovation for Safety in Healthcare Design: Ellen Taylor
Season 2024 Episode 9 | 51m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
Invention, Inquiry, or Innovation for Safety in Healthcare Design - Ellen Taylor
Ellen Taylor, Vice President for Research at The Center fo Health Design gives a lecture on Invention, Inquiry, or Innovation for Safety in Healthcare Design.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Texas A&M Architecture For Health is a local public television program presented by KAMU
Texas A&M Architecture For Health
Invention, Inquiry, or Innovation for Safety in Healthcare Design: Ellen Taylor
Season 2024 Episode 9 | 51m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
Ellen Taylor, Vice President for Research at The Center fo Health Design gives a lecture on Invention, Inquiry, or Innovation for Safety in Healthcare Design.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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So today we have Doctor Ellen Taylor, vice president of research from the center for Health Design, joining us.
Ellen has over 35 years of experience in the areas of architectural research and business.
And her work includes developing, managing and guiding built environment research at the center for Health Design currently.
And she has previously been working, on Large-Scale Program Management, Capital Planning, services, Standard Planning, and extensive Cross-Departmental coordination.
So please help me welcome Doctor Ellen Taylor to the podium.
Great.
So it's wonderful to be here.
I, as Roxana mentioned, I'm with the center for Health Design, which is based in California.
I, however, am not based in California.
I am based in New York City.
So it's always fun to get out of the city and see some other parts of the country.
In addition to my role as being the vice president for research at the center for Health Design, I'm also the vice chair for the Facility Guidelines Institute Health Guidelines Revisions Committee.
So I have a role in policy making associated with health care design.
And I am coeditor of the journal with my esteemed colleague Kirk Hamilton, who was in the back of the room.
So have an influence on how research is disseminated throughout our field as well.
So those are exciting things that all start to tie together.
And I think we'll start to see the importance of having all of these things tie together as I work through the lecture.
I have my first degree is in architecture, and I was a practicing architect for a number of years, and my surprise came when I worked on the owner side of the table and they didn't value design.
And I realized that I really needed to figure out the business side of things.
And I ended up getting my MBA.
My undergraduate degree in architecture is from Cornell, got my MBA from Columbia University in London Business School, and then eventually ended up getting a PhD from Loughborough University in England.
So I call myself a pound puppy.
I come from a different background, and I would just offer for all of you that you never know where your path is going to lead.
I said I was never going to get another degree after I finish my Bachelor's of Architecture, and yet here I am.
So you just never know.
Leave yourself open for opportunities.
So I'm excited to talk about innovation and invention and inquiry.
And I'm going to start by saying, and I was sharing this with Roxana earlier.
I hate the word innovation.
I really hate the word innovation.
There's just a lot of stuff that comes with that.
So part of what I'm going to talk about is how to sort of pull this together and make it make sense, at least from my perspective.
And I hope it makes sense for you too.
So these are some of the things that we're going to talk about today, sort of the differences between innovation and invention.
And where does inquiry and investigation fit into that?
Being able to use an evidence based design process, being able to understand the value of participatory design and co-design and really looking at sources of innovation, and that's really where I'm going to spend the bulk of time, because for me, that's what starts to make sense about pulling all of this together.
So let's just start with some definitions.
So an invention is the creation of something new can be an idea, an artifact, you know, a product or a device or something.
But just because it's an invention doesn't mean that it's going to be an innovation.
So anybody can really invent something, but it has to have meaning within the industry to actually become something innovative.
So if you look at then what is the definition of an innovation?
It's the same thing.
It's new ideas or new practices, except that it includes this notion of the adoption of this new idea into practice or in the community.
So that's really where we're going to focus on sort of this differentiation between is it an innovation, yet how has innovation evolved in health care design and how does it tie in to safety?
So this gets to the fact that I hate this word.
It is a buzz word.
It means a lot of different things to different people.
And a lot of times people will just throw it out there and say, oh, well, we need to innovate.
We're going to create this innovative concept without really an understanding of the work that it takes to create innovation.
So there is a creative side of things, and there is a structured side of things that needs to happen.
And at the time, this, came from a Harvard Business Review article in 2020.
And at the time of that publication, the author said there were 70,000 books on innovation.
There were 20 would take 2500 years to get through all of those books that there were 2 billion Google search results and 4858 digital articles just in the Harvard Business Review alone.
So again, it's this big, expansive term, and somehow we need to make it make sense.
So as a researcher, as somebody who wants to see the logical side of things, I really struggle to try and figure out how do I find a model like who else believes like I do?
That innovation can be grounded in research.
And lo and behold, I found this model from Lars Eric Holm Quist, who was, the leader of the Mobile Innovations group at Yahoo Labs.
And he really looked at this idea of invention being focused on ideas and investigation and inquiry really being part of this innovation process.
Sort of leading to a user oriented design, really understanding how do you gain that traction?
How do you make this adaptable within practice and with communities?
It's by making sure that it's focused on what people need and what people want.
And then ultimately you end up with what he calls grounded innovation.
And I thought, I like that term grounded innovation.
Sounds good to me.
We can ground innovation in research, and we can have a framework around how we think about this.
So one of the important things that he talks about is design is not innovation.
Innovation, excuse me, that basically as architects and designers typically when we have a project, the owner has come to you with a problem that needs to be solved, or you are helping to define what the problems are to be solved.
That doesn't necessarily lead to innovation.
It can, but it's slightly different.
There is an assumption a lot of clients assume that they've hired an architect who has experience, particularly in healthcare design, that they know what they're doing, that you are going to come up with an ideal solution and everything is going to work.
You're going to achieve this ideal state.
We all know that that doesn't necessarily happen all the time, and it takes work.
It takes a lot of work between the architect and the client to actually create that balance.
So one of the ways that we can start to think about this is to introduce an evidence based design process, again, ground some of the thinking and research and really understand where is the box, so that we can then figure out how do we need to be outside of the box, or should we be outside of the box.
And part of innovation is risk.
And health care is notoriously risk averse.
So it is very difficult to get somebody to sign up to your new idea if it's backed by research, you probably have a little bit of a better chance.
And through some of the things that we're going to talk about, you have even more of a chance to sort of evolve some of these new ideas.
So inquiry and investigation research can be that bridge to innovation.
So I want to back up again and talk a little bit about designing for safety.
How many people are familiar with the Swiss cheese model of accident causation?
A couple of people.
So the Swiss cheese model was developed by James Rees, and a number of years ago he's evolved it into multiple different forms.
But the basic premise is think of a piece of Swiss cheese.
It's got lots of holes in it, and you're going to slice it up from the first slice to the last slice.
The holes don't all line up and reasons premise was think about this as how accidents happen.
So there's something at one end.
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