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‍We’ve turned innovation into a relay race

The organizations looking to champion health innovation typically access deep expertise in the individual disciplines required to take an idea into the world. The difficulty is that those disciplines often sit within different teams, agencies, budgets, and moments in the process.

On paper, the journey might look logically connected: first design, then stakeholder consultation, then solution development, and finally implementation. Along the way, behaviors begin to change and adoption eventually creates wider impact.

In practice, the journey often operates more like a relay race. Each team is incentivized, quite reasonably, to solve the challenge in front of it and deliver its part of the process before handing the baton onwards.

However, a product can win design awards and still struggle with adoption because it doesn’t fit an existing clinical pathway. An intervention patients love may require behaviors that are hard to maintain amid the chaos of daily life. Strong evidence won’t go anywhere if the people with the power to change practice do not understand or support the proposed solution. By the time marketing teams arrive, there may be very little a PR campaign can do to change decisions made years earlier that have left an innovation difficult to understand, trust, or adopt.

When the process is organized as a succession of handovers, momentum gets lost in the gaps between disciplines. That isn’t a failure of intent. It’s a failure of design.

The monsters don’t wait patiently for their turn

At IDEO, we’ve described some of healthcare’s most stubborn obstacles as monsters: entrenched complexity, ingrained barriers, fragmented systems, and convoluted communications. Behind the playful names are problems rooted in organizational habits, inherited assumptions, and ways of working that can be every bit as challenging as the technical problem an innovation is trying to solve.

The difficulty is that these barriers rarely exist in isolation. For example, what looks like a patient experience problem might be shaped by internal processes, organizational culture, or the systems clinicians work with. Focusing too narrowly on the obvious problem in front of you can mean missing the factors elsewhere in the system that help create it. In our experience, the monster you can see is not always the one doing the most damage.

That became apparent in IDEO’s work with Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH). The hospital wanted to improve patient care, but its leaders recognized that doing so also meant looking at the experience of the people delivering it. Starting in the Women’s Imaging Center, teams redesigned mammogram workflows, developed experience principles, and tested new service ideas with patients before expanding the work into other parts of the hospital.

One of the most impactful prototypes was Care Modes, a pre-surgery tool that empowered NWH care teams to tailor their approach and interactions to patients’ unique needs, beyond just clinical requirements. Organized around four distinct patient engagement modes—Explain, Partner, Embrace, and Encourage—Care Modes was designed to help patients feel more comfortable with their decision to have surgery. It was so successful that the hospital eventually incorporated it into its electronic medical record. Improving the front-of-house patient experience at NWH meant addressing larger back-of-house issues around staff culture, working practices, and the systems clinicians used every day.

When it comes to health innovation, the barrier that actually stops an idea from gaining traction may sit well beyond the original design brief, which is why organizations need to look for those connections much earlier in the journey.

Start with the impact and work backward

Human-centered design starts with people—not the product. Applied to the innovation journey, that means starting with people and working backward. How does the innovation fit existing practices or behaviors? What could make adoption difficult? What needs to change to support the implementation of the new idea?

When Sanofi launched Beyfortus, the first RSV immunization for newborns, we worked together to figure out how to communicate the value of the life-saving vaccine to parents. The IDEO team interviewed parents, caregivers, healthcare professionals, and administrators in Germany, Spain, China, and the US to explore potential barriers to adoption.

The research revealed very different considerations across the experience. Healthcare professionals needed training that could flex between markets and professional contexts. New parents found receiving vaccine information immediately after giving birth overwhelming. Conversations needed to start earlier in pregnancy and continue after families left the hospital, when further questions might emerge.

Those insights informed a flexible global communications toolkit, which the team refined through co-design workshops focused on market fit. The communications about the immunization were integrated into the launch design itself.

The ecosystem is part of the design

Every innovation enters a health system shaped by patients, clinicians, commissioners, charities, professional bodies, regulators, policymakers, and public debate. Any one of them can affect whether an innovation moves forward, stalls, or reaches people unevenly.

Stakeholder engagement, policy, advocacy, behavioral insight, and communications often come during later stages of an innovation’s journey. Brought in earlier, these perspectives can reveal pressures affecting decision-makers, worries shared among patients, misconceptions that could fracture trust, and practical or political constraints that influence what can realistically be brought to life.

Consider Lexington Health’s work with Pfizer to better understand the unmet needs of people with blood cancer. Lexington brought patient organizations and people affected by the disease into the process by creating advisory boards, then worked with Pfizer UK and Blood Cancer UK to draw on the resulting insights to co-develop a patient charter. It was accompanied by a policy briefing that provided recommendations to improve diagnosis, outcomes, and patient experiences. This work reminds us that the ecosystem surrounding an innovation is not simply an audience to engage at launch: involving patients and advocacy groups early can help define the barriers that need to be addressed and shape the policy conditions required for change.

Lexington Health’s work with Roche Diagnostics UK & Ireland and Action on Pre-eclampsia offers another example. Using updated National Institute for Health and Care Excellence testing guidance as a hook, the campaign put patient and clinical voices at the center of a story about unequal access to pre-eclampsia testing during pregnancy across the UK. Media coverage highlighted the campaigners’ desired policy changes, while engagement with political stakeholders in Scotland helped secure a meeting between Action on Pre-eclampsia and Scotland’s First Minister. The Scottish Government later announced dedicated funding for implementing pre-eclampsia testing across every National Health Service Health Board in Scotland.

Here, progress depended on bringing patient experience, clinical voices, public attention, and political decision-makers into the conversation.

Don’t design the innovation and then design adoption

If an innovation requires clinicians to alter established practice, patients to make unfamiliar choices, or healthcare organizations to change built-in processes, those behavior changes must be included in the design process. Waiting until implementation leaves far less room to address the design decisions that created barriers in the first place.

The same applies to the wider system. If policy or professional guidance will determine whether an innovation reaches people, those perspectives must inform the process early enough to shape what gets built, how evidence is generated, and what needs to change around it.

The organization needs to be designed, too

If health organizations repeatedly watch good innovations get stuck between development, implementation, and adoption, how much of the problem comes from the way the organization has designed pathways to innovation or ways of working? We encounter this challenge repeatedly: organizations excel at individual stages of innovation, but their specialist-function structures and distinct development stages inadvertently undermine the connections between them. That structure shapes behavior in ways that are easy to overlook. Teams commission work sequentially rather than simultaneously. Briefs are handed over rather than shared. Design concludes before policy and communications begin. Each decision feels rational in isolation; collectively, they build the gaps that innovation later falls into.

Breaking that pattern doesn’t necessarily require restructuring—but it does require a deliberate choice to bring different perspectives into the room earlier, with a shared brief, a common definition of success, and a design and stakeholder strategy that’s developed in parallel rather than in sequence. These aren’t radical changes, but they require organizations to resist the pull of their existing processes.

The route from health innovation to health impact is rarely simple. Finances, regulation, evidence, behavior, economics, politics, and the realities of people’s lives tend to be complexifiers. The organizations best equipped to make innovation stick will embrace that complexity and design the conditions for success alongside the solution itself.

A brilliant idea can only change healthcare if it can make the journey into people’s lives.

Is your organization navigating health innovation challenges around design, implementation, or adoption? Reach out to Jess Farmery at Lexington Health and Betsy Fields Smith at IDEO to discuss how we can provide support.

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