Bringing Amazon-Style Innovation to Healthcare

The U.S. health care industry is experiencing change at a historic pace. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to harness these divergent changes to achieve innovation on a widespread scale. And yet that level of innovation is not only desirable, it’s essential. That’s the message Aaron Martin, executive vice president and chief digital officer at Providence St. Joseph Health in Seattle, shared with attendees at AHIP’s Institute and Expo in Austin.

Prior to moving to health care, Martin spent years creating change in the publishing industry at Amazon, where he was the North American director of Kindle and print-on-demand services. As such, he has a track record of creating meaningful, sustainable change on a large scale.

Martin offered a five-point blueprint for innovation that’s broadly applicable to health care organizations.

First, think big. “The U.S. health care industry as a whole would be the fifth largest economy on the planet, right behind Germany,” Martin said in an interview with AHIP. “Make sure the work that you’re proposing is going to matter in terms of moving the industry’s total economics.”