Team Innovation in Healthcare

This chapter explores team innovation in the context of healthcare by integrating literature and empirical evidence from the organizational, social, and medical sciences on team innovation. Innovation encompasses the activities that transform the intentional decision to adopt and implement a new idea, process, product, or procedure into regular and sustained practice. The healthcare industry needs innovation to adapt to and manage complexity within a rapidly changing healthcare system. Interdisciplinary teams have been adopted as innovations to solve certain problems in healthcare that require coordinated interdependent action and complementary knowledge and skills, such as chronic conditions and disease management, patient safety concerns, and cancer treatment and care. Teams may also be employed to manage healthcare innovation adoption and implementation efforts, and the industry must leverage team composition and team process factors to help these healthcare teams innovate.