INNOVATION – ISSUE NO. 219

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford. Why start out with a quote from Henry Ford? This past week we posted two stories that were different but had a thread that tied them together. One was about a new surgical procedure at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and the other was about how "electronic gadgets" are changing our lives. The thread that connects them is innovation. Healthcare is a dynamic environment. We do not know where the next idea will come from. It does not have to come from medicine directly as the one article points out. Somebody can create an app that can monitor our blood sugar from our smart phone. We are in an age of monitoring and collecting data to help us better understand our processes, whether it is for work or about our life. Innovation is taking place all around us. Healthmark has taken something as simple as monitoring your manual bath temperature and joining that information with how much cleaning solution you need to have in a tank and created the Healthmark Watermark™. Taking two concepts and putting them together. Simple innovation to help monitor two critical parts of the cleaning process at one time. Henry Ford, rather than breeding faster horses, found a different way to achieve the same goal: improving the new machine called the "horseless carriage" and creating the "Model T".