As a world-renowned global health enterprise and one of the leading healthcare systems in the United States, Johns Hopkins Medicine works to achieve its vision to “deliver the promise of medicine” to its patients and the community at large by setting the standard of excellence in medical education, research and clinical care.
To build on this mission, in 2015 Johns Hopkins established its Sibley Innovation Hub at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. The 3,000 square foot facility has become a supportive and enriching resource not just for Sibley associates but for healthcare professionals and researchers throughout the U.S.
Built upon the premise that any new practices developed at the hub will be beneficial and transferable to many other health institutions throughout the country, the Sibley Innovation Hub is a hotspot for new ideas and creative solutions. And Sibley’s location, proximal to the US capital in Washington D.C., gives Johns Hopkins innovators an even greater opportunity to reach out to national policy makers and have an impact on a federal level.
This allows lay people, the individuals directly affected by health care policy, to have a say as well. Sibley’s innovation process begins on a human level, by developing a thorough understanding of patient and community needs. On a practical level this means that the hub opens its doors to essentially anyone, from top researchers and influencers, to patients and their families, to students, to volunteers, who has an idea they think could improve healthcare.
According to the hub, “By encouraging ideas from diverse perspectives, the Innovation Hub fosters creativity, imagination and partnerships between innovators who might not otherwise have a chance to work together.”
Sibley’s human approach to innovation influences the entire culture of the hub, what it refers to as a 'culture of design'. The hub uses design thinking to tackle and solve problems with an end-user in mind, rather than an end-goal, with the core belief that this kind of culture fosters more engagement, creativity, and people-centeredness.
For instance, the hub’s Transition Projects aim to replace hospital “discharges” with “transitions” of patients in order to emphasize that patient care does not end once the patient leaves the hospital; it transitions to a different kind of care.
Sibley Innovation Hub’s goal is to envision what healthcare will be like in five years and make that today’s reality. It is a true healthcare innovation trendsetter, that doesn’t look to technology, or money and time-saving techniques as the core of its inspiration. It looks to the people themselves, and how they can be best served and cared for in every healthcare expereience.
