title: Innovating in health delivery: The Penn medicine innovation tournament.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Innovation tournaments can drive engagement and value generation by shifting problem-solving towards the end user. In health care, where the frontline workers have the most intimate understanding of patients' experience and the delivery process, encouraging them to generate and develop new approaches is critical to improving health care delivery.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  In many health care organizations, senior managers and clinicians retain control of innovation. Frontline workers need to be engaged in the innovation process.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  Penn Medicine launched a system-wide innovation tournament with the goal of improving the patient experience. We set a quantitative goal of receiving 500 ideas and getting at least 1000 employees to participate in the tournament. A secondary goal was to involve various groups of the care process (doctors, nurses, clerical staff, transporters).
  
  
  METHODS
  The tournament was broken up into three phases. During Phase 1, employees were encouraged to submit ideas. Submissions were judged by an expert panel and crowd sourcing based on their potential to improve patient experience and ability to be implemented within 6 months. During Phase 2, the best 200 ideas were pitched during a series of 5 workshops and ten finalists were selected. During Phase 3, the best 10 ideas were presented to and judged by an audience of about 200 interested employees and a judging panel of 15 administrators. Two winners were selected.
  
  
  RESULTS
  A total of 1739 ideas were submitted and over 5000 employees participated in the innovation tournament. Patient convenience/amenities (21%) was the top category of submission, with other popular areas including technology optimization (11%), assistance with navigation within UPHS (10%), and improving patient/family centered care (9%) and care delivery models/transitions (9%). A combination of winning and submitted ideas were implemented.
authors.affiliation: Penn Medicine Center for Innovation, United States; Department of Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA19104, United States; Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, United States.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Terwiesch
authors.affiliation: Penn Medicine Center for Innovation, United States; Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, United States; Department of Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA19104, United States. Electronic address: shivan.mehta@uphs.upenn.edu.
authors.forename: Shivan J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Mehta
authors.affiliation: Penn Medicine Center for Innovation, United States; Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, United States; Department of Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA19104, United States; Center for Health Equity Research & Promotion, Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, United States.
authors.forename: Kevin G
authors.initials: KG
authors.lastname: Volpp
keywords: Health delivery; Innovation; Operations improvement