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Building on our goal of expanding notions of collaboration and healthcare teams, this week we had the very distinct pleasure of speaking with Scott Capdevielle, CEO of Syndicom to gather some of his thoughts on collaboration, innovation and healthcare. Scott’s expertise and experience with software, collaboration, web 2.0 media and entrepreneurship is broad with decades of experience in technology startup companies including strengths in team building (exemplary management teams and advisory boards), innovative vision, and leadership. In this podcast he shares with us the inspiration he gained from working with open source software and Ray Miles and his colleagues at UCLA, which led to the birth of Syndicom and Spine Connect; his perspective on collaboration and why it is important in industries which rely on innovation networks as well as the ingredients for successful approaches to collaboration which usually entail some radical changes in the ways companies organize themselves and people work together.

By 2010, Ray Miles and his colleagues predicted that innovation networks would dominate as a form of organizing. This would require new forms of infrastructure and consulting to support these new forms of organization. Syndicom provides such infrastructure and consulting to the medical industry. When Syndicom was in development, Scott consulted with an entrepreneurial surgeon friend, Jim Youssef, to help co-found the company as they began to explore innovation opportunities as performed by surgeons distributed throughout the world. The idea was that networked innovation requires collaboration as a skill and there needed to be training, support and software skills that would develop that skill.

Beyond this training and infrastructure however, Scott’s experience shows that collaboration requires a re-thinking of the organization and how we work with our partners. A collaborative approach requires an ‘all together’ mentality where a successful outcome needs to benefit all and all are treated equally so that the allocation of equity and collaboration is correlated to the value that is created. To be treated like a partner though, is rare and yet crucial to collaboration and scalable innovation. Some companies are not ready to change the ways they do business and so collaborative networks fail. Others change the way they do business and take a more partnering approach, having collaborative success. Web 2.0 with its inherently collaborative nature requires such an approach if companies really want to harness its potential.

Thus, innovation is ultimately about process and product. For Syndicom’s clients who train surgeons for example, the community provides a mechanism for connecting newly trained surgeons to faculty support 24-7, which increases technology adoption. These experts become co-collaborators in the development of expertise. This process of developing expertise on a broad scale requires clients to re-think their training programs, invest in new materials and processes and add somebody to manage the new surgeon network. Some of the successful companies create communities now which organically form sub networks amongst themselves to discuss experiments they are working on as surgeons begin to innovate on the procedure themselves. Companies who do not change the process this way see less success with their surgeon networks.

Ultimately, Scott believes that healthcare is naturally a very collaborative field given the sheer number of people who are involved in any patient’s care. If they can all be coordinated to provide optimal care, then collaboration has been leveraged to the benefit of all. In the future, while huge companies work on transportable patient records, he believes that the clinician facing collaboration realm will continue to work on continuum of care issues, where physicians collaborate in a multidisciplinary fashion before they recommend patients to another specialist. In doing so, they collaboratively find the best possible path of care for the patient, reducing unnecessary concern, travel and hassle and improving patient care.

We hope you enjoy listening to Scott’s podcast as much as we did conducting it. It is not often we get to have such a great discussion on the power of collaboration and community and we hope you will take a moment to connect with him at some point at a conference or leave a comment here on this post!

With thanks to buck82 and Will Merydith for their wonderful images!

Good things happen when we connect!

Kirsten Broadfoot

Tags: adoption of technology, clinician collaboration, collaborative, continuum of care, equity allocation, faculty support, faculty support services, health 2.0, healthcare, in patient care, innovation networks, Jim Youssef, medical community, online community, open source software, opensource software, partnering, partnering with, partnership, patient care, Ray Miles, scalable innovation, scott capdevielle, spine connect, surgeon network, surgeon training, syndicom, technology adoption, web 2.0 health

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under Blog.