In the News

By Jeff Niederhausen Budgeting is a key part to any business. Whether you participate in your department’s budget building or not, it is important to know about its limitations and opportunities existing within it. Budgets are a part of everyone’s life, no matter how you look at it. Maybe you don’t track your spending in…

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Summer 2017 Dramatic healthcare breakthroughs require innovative project managers. By any measure, the healthcare industry is on the brink of unprecedented challenges, even in the face of medical and technological breakthroughs that offer exciting and hopeful new treatment options. Consider the sweeping changes implemented by the Affordable Care Act that current political turmoil seeks to…

Written by Joe Randolph, President & CEO, The Innovation Institute | May 02, 2017 | Print | Email Adelaide, or Addie, will be born in August 2017. When she arrives, she will face a future much different than her grandfather did when he was born in the late 1950’s. Addie will have an expected lifespan that is about…

By George Hampton What will become of this place if I leave? That’s a good question! Have you contemplated this question? Every leader should. It may seem odd thinking about your own replacement, maybe even threatening. I would suggest that you look at this idea from the standpoint of your own success. Every good manager…

The Innovation Institute, a California firm that invests in and helps grow cutting-edge companies in the healthcare sector, has acquired Franciscan Health and Wellness Services, a health solutions and wellness company that was founded and owned by Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System. Terms of the acquisition, which closed earlier this month, were not…

La Palma Facility Further Diversifies Innovation Institute LLC named Christina Waters executive-in-residence at its lab-incubator-accelerator in an effort to begin genomic medicine work. The for-profit group in La Palma looks for ways to advance healthcare industry practices. It’s co-owned by five nonprofit hospitals and systems, which locally include St. Joseph Hoag Health in Irvine and…

Excerpted from the Orange County Business Journal

by Jun Gang | Apr 4, 2017 3:49pm Pictured is a hybrid operating room at one of the hospitals Petra ICS works with. The Siemens C-Arm that is mounted on a robotic arm is the same robotic arm that is used to build BMW automobiles, an example of taking ideas from other industries. Image: The…

By Ernest Oates and Jeff Niederhausen One of the biggest things we have been hearing about in our industry centers around the Alternate Equipment Maintenance (AEM) program. For many facilities, this program can be a struggle to build. Trying to figure out where to start is even worse. In our program, we have tackled this…

Augmented reality (AR) is gaining traction in health care by providing us with another dimension to our physical world, and allowing us to see a digital layer of text or images to enhance what we experience in the real world. As an example, AR can provide surgeons with 3-D reconstructions of tumors with x-ray views…

By George Hampton At the risk of sounding like “Captain Obvious,” the health care industry as a whole is struggling financially. Everyone is being called to task for savings and clinical technology programs are certainly no exception. Perhaps your program has flown under the “cost cutting” radar in the past. I know that many organizations…

Today, we are seeing the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare as it helps us integrate disparate data types to answer complex questions that were previously unknown. According to the recent PwC Health Research Institute’s annual report, emerging technologies, including AI, are being deployed in healthcare and have great potential to disrupt in 2017.…

  by Joe Randolph  The Innovation Institute, a national healthcare technology incubator, works with physicians and clinicians to advance innovation by solving problems on the front line. We are hopeful that the solutions focused on sepsis will make it into the mainstream of patient care one day soon to help eradicate this leading cause of…

Reton, Wash.-based Providence St. Joseph Health’s California arm, St. Joseph Health, has its own take on technology, and its Southern California division, St. Joseph Hoag Health, will gradually incorporate the technologies that St. Joseph Health implements. “If you look at St. Joseph [Health] within the acute or ambulatory space, we are actively providing care to…

Written by Joe Randolph, President and CEO, The Innovation Institute  As we reflect on 2016 and move full speed into 2017, I am hopeful that the physician inventors we are working with through The Innovation Institute, a national health care technology incubator, will get closer to beating sepsis, the leading cause of preventable death in…

“Doctor, I have carpal tunnel syndrome. Can you help me?” “Sure, of course. What symptoms have you been having?” “Well, my hand and wrist hurt a lot. And I work on a computer all day long.” “Hmmm. I see. It sounds like you definitely have some issues, but your symptoms are not consistent with carpal…

Office Furniture Group has joined The Innovation Institute as one of its healthcare service company subsidiaries. According to OFG President Scott Lazarus, OFG represents over 250 manufacturers and, as a Platinum Teknion dealer, has the necessary tools, resources and talents to conquer any project on a local, national and international level. More…

By Jeff Niederhausen Whether you are a technician or in management, keeping the financial bottom line in mind in everyday business is an important part of creating a superior or great biomedical program. It doesn’t make a difference if you are an in-house group or working for a third-party vendor. In today’s health care environment,…

The healthcare industry is fueling a local business, so much so they’ve expanded. At MultiMedical Systems in northwest Fresno, getting medical supplies to customers is serious business. Equipment like ventilators line their shelves, and they’re ready to head out the door to hospitals across the area and they just expanded their 10,000 square foot facility.…

MultiMedical Systems, a medical equipment maintenance and repair business in Fresno, is expanding rapidly since merging last year with the Innovation Institute, a collaborative of health systems. MultiMedical, established in 1996, has doubled its office space on Golden State Boulevard, near Tac-Ops Laser Tag, in northwest Fresno. It occupies 10,000 square feet of space and…

By George Hampton Carrying a tool kit is everyday life for a healthcare technology management (HTM) professional. We all do it or did it. If you do it long enough (for me that was 16 years), you might have an opportunity to move into a leadership position. It’s a major decision, and one rife with…

Over the past two or three years architects have begun to recognize that the care delivery process they were designing around and to great precision — or the Swiss watch syndrome — may not exist for long.    More…

At the La Palma, Calif.-based Innovation Institute’s Petra Integrated Construction Strategies subsidiary, for instance, Chris Hickman, assistant vice president of planning and design, is attempting to develop a system that allows health care leaders to decide between repairing or replacing various mechanical-electrical-plumbing and telecommunication systems over the wide range of facilities found in integrated health…

Recognizing the need for a better technology to help strengthen the foot and ankle muscles, Scott Rogoff, PT, DPT, OCS, a physical therapist at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, Calif., decided to develop his own solution to the problem. As someone who suffered from his own injuries in that region, he was quite attuned…

It was quite inspiring to hear Jeffrey Hausfeld, MD, founder and chairman of the Board of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE), speak recently about his experience as a surgeon, innovator and entrepreneur. This was during the inaugural meeting of the Society’s Orange County/San Diego Chapter held at our Innovation Lab in Newport Beach. SoPE,…

The Innovation Institute announced today that it was among the Finalists for the 2016 Innovations in HealthcareTM ABBY Awards presented by the Adaptive Business Leaders (ABL) Organization. Winners were announced at the Awards Event on October 26, 2016 in Long Beach. The Innovation Institute, which focuses on transforming healthcare through the development of innovative new products, services,…

It’s often been said that the apple doesn’t far fall from the tree and that is the case for Jeremy Westkamper, a biomed who is now a clinical engineering account director. His father was a GE field service engineer, who enjoyed his work, and that rubbed off on Jeremy while he was growing up in…

Data have become the lifeblood of health care, holding the promise to improve nearly every clinical and administrative aspect of the system. HIM, and coding in particular, is certainly no exception. And perhaps nowhere do data hold more promise than in the management of a remote coding workforce. Yet despite their potential, data remain underutilized…

The newly established Orange County/San Diego Chapter of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE) will celebrate its kickoff meeting, hosted by The Innovation Institute, from 5:30  to 7 p.m. Nov. 1 at the Institute’s Innovation Lab in Newport Beach. SoPE is a biomedical and healthcare innovation network of over 25,000 international members and an alliance…