Altering Frontiers. Группа авторов

      Foreword by Jean-Louis Denis

      Adaptation, Trust and Methodology

      The issue of organizational innovation in health is not new, but it is nonetheless topical. All health systems in high-income countries face significant challenges when adapting their health systems to changing demands, knowledge and preferences, economic circumstances or technologies (Denis et al. 2018). The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for organizational innovation to better respond to the unexpected and ensure an adequate and accountable response. These organizational innovations are multifaceted and refer to a reconfiguration of the professional, clinical, managerial and civic logics, to name but a few, that structure the functioning of a healthcare system (Thornton & Ocasio 2008). The healthcare system has long been characterized by a significant gap between technical innovation and organizational or institutional innovation. While such a gap is not unique to the healthcare sector, it is surprisingly acute in this sector. Technical innovation in the broadest sense of the term is a powerful driver of change in the healthcare sector. New drugs and diagnostic and therapeutic technologies are penetrating the healthcare system and organizations at a speed that makes them difficult to master. What is looming in terms of cell therapies is described as a tsunami that could sweep away the healthcare system, or at least revive it without being able to escape the difficult question of costs and what should or should not be offered by our social welfare systems. Digital innovation and artificial intelligence will also bring about organizational and institutional transformations (Hinings et al. 2018).

      Organizational innovation, which can be more broadly described as immaterial innovation, is difficult to bring about, or at least to such a degree that it would allow better control of so-called technical innovations. One need only think of the experience of healthcare systems in the face of the deinstitutionalization of care made possible (in principle) by the arrival of laparoscopic technologies in the 1990s. The development of ambulatory care has been slower than otherwise, and clinical or organizational environments have had difficulty capitalizing on this opportunity.

This is certainly a reflection of reasonable caution, since innovation must make it possible to produce quality care in complete safety. There is also the imprint left by professional, organizational or political rigidities that make this capitalization uncertain or late.

      Healthcare is not alone in this fight for innovation. Other sectors of activity, including that of economically oriented companies, have long stressed the difficulty of renewing social relations of production in favor of greater adaptation to a constantly changing environment (Osty et al. 2007). In the healthcare sector, organizational innovations, which I would call “basic”, are also slow to materialize. Take, for example, the difficulty in linking the designation of responsibility for care, the establishment of incentives to take on this responsibility and the optimization of the use of clinical resources. The interest in France and elsewhere in the implementation of new organizational forms such as Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) is a major challenge in terms of innovation (Lemaire 2019). More broadly, we could also highlight the difficulty for several healthcare systems to also refocus their mission toward emerging priorities (mental health, frailty, etc.). Obviously, this is not only a question of organizational innovation, but also of innovations in terms of mentalities and social relations between stakeholders. So what does this book offer us? Without claiming to do it justice in a few lines, it serves to better understand the strategies likely to promote and capitalize on organizational innovation. The interest of such a book lies not in its diagnostic scope – the problem is fairly well known – but in the avenues of response it proposes to the tricky issue of the cumbersomeness or inadequacy of organizational innovation in health. I will limit myself to some remarks on the three main theses that make up the three parts of the book. These three themes are partly overlapping and I will come back to them in conclusion.

The first theme of this book, dealt with in Part 1 entitled “Innovations as Seen by Stakeholders”, raises the question of the agility of health innovation processes. In this case, innovation means developing a greater scope for the thought and action of stakeholders on the usual channels of power, whether they are professionals or patients. Organizational innovation here involves the ability to generate counter-powers in order to increase the legitimacy of new knowledge, modes of intervention and representations. These counter-powers (Light 2010) are the source of innovation insofar as they are and will be powerful enough to move away from the reproduction