The Next Generation of Innovation at Beacon
Innovation is part of Beacon’s culture — it’s in our DNA! To help take us into the next stages of Innovation — taking awesome ideas and forming them into successful business models — Brett Belock, MBA, and Mary Kuhr Anderson, MBA, have joined us as Innovation Project Consultants to lead the Beacon Business Innovation Lab.
A Look Inside the Lab
Teaming up with our Performance Improvement and Exceptional Experience teams, Brett and Mary will collect and prototype potential system-wide Innovation projects and shepherd them through a coordinated, formal approval and implementation process. In essence, the Innovation Lab isn’t a particular place but a gathering of resources to allow something great to happen.
“We’ll help identify the bigger opportunities across the organization to bring in new customers as well as increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention,” says Mary.
At the same time, they will keep an eye on major national health care developments to ensure we act on any trending opportunities.
Among the duo’s first projects will be harnessing Beacon’s capabilities for telemedicine and seeking ways to improve the customer experience at our medical practices.
“We need to remember that we have internal ‘customers,’ too — other associates and physicians, for example, as well as our patients, visitors and guests,” explains Brett. “Everybody is a customer of somebody else in some capacity.”
Staying agile and adapting to the ever-changing health care industry is a part of Innovation, too. For example, we all need to remember that our health care consumers are more retail-minded today due to the popularity of high-deductible health plans that include more out-of-pocket expenses, says Mary. In addition to superior quality, they expect convenience, collaboration with providers, choices and value.
“So at every touch point along a customer’s experience — every, single encounter a person has with our organization — we all have an opportunity to reinforce a positive relationship” says Mary.
Staying In the Innovation Zone at Work
- Be sure to sign up for a Beacon Academy Innovation class through NetLearning.
- Approach your work with a learning mindset and a curiosity.
- Expand your thinking beyond your particular duties and think of other associates as your customers too. For example, is there anything you can do to help other associates who are either upstream or downstream from your job to accomplish their work more easily?
