The Steele Institute for Health Innovation at Geisinger
By Karen Murphy, PhD, RN, Executive Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer, Geisinger
Geisinger is an integrated health care delivery system that is comprised of approximately 30,000 employees, including nearly 1,600 employed physicians, 13 hospital campuses, two research centers, an innovation institute, a medical school and a health plan with more than 600,000 members.
Geisinger is recognized as one of the nation’s most innovative health services organizations. In 2018, to continue Geisinger’s third generation of innovation, the Steele Institute for Health Innovation was created. The Institute is named after Dr. Glenn Steele, former Geisinger CEO and a pioneer of innovation.
The Steele Institute for Health Innovation forges a new generation of transformative, scalable, measurable, and sustainable solutions that improve health, care delivery, patient experience and lower cost. The Steele Institute is grounded in a belief that innovation is defined as a “fundamentally different approach to solving a problem that has quantifiable outcomes”.
The work of the Institute is organized by foundational pillars concentrated on three areas: health, care delivery, and payment transformation. We’re developing new care delivery and payment models. We are also working to develop innovative approaches to address social determinants of health that improve the health of individuals and communities.
The Steele Institute’s partner support services function as a range of teams and divisions that are aligned to access, utilize and maximize Geisinger’s assets.
The Data Enterprise division maintains Geisinger’s data warehouse, which houses data from the clinical system, the health plan and one of the world’s largest genomic biobanks. They provide routine and on-demand analytic reports to support health system and health plan operations and clinical care delivery.
The expertise of our cross-functional Product Innovation spans the areas of advanced and predictive analytics, informatics, software development, experience strategy, product design and product management. They have helped to design and deploy a range of products including the Anticipatory Management Program (AMP) and EMS Go, an app designed and developed with individuals from EMS, Geisinger Trauma Services and Life Flight®, to help emergency providers route patients to the appropriate treatment centers.
The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Lab focus on the development of technology and tools to identify populations at highest risk or those who would benefit most from specific intervention. The Steele Institute has an internal team working on developing our own artificial intelligence as well as partnering with external leaders in this space. Over the next few years, the team will partner to build and deploy new algorithms to detect flu, pre-type 2 diabetes, and chronic disease management.
The Intelligent Automation team focuses on automating repetitive business processes that do not require higher-order human intelligence or intervention with the goal of reducing operating cost and increasing job satisfaction.
Human emotions and behavior are what our Applied Behavioral Insight team does best. They leverage theories in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology to help integrate “nudges” into workflows and processes to passively encourage better decision making.
The Steele Institute for Health Innovation is looking forward to guiding innovation efforts to improve health, health care delivery, and lower cost.
