After Peter Szollosi passed away in 2007, his friends and family approached Dr. Lyle Berkowitz about founding The Szollosi Healthcare Innovation Program. This charitable endeavor launched in January 2008 and adopted Szollosi’s mantra- “I don’t care what you can’t do” with the goal of using innovative thinking to improve the healthcare experience for us all.
Your health is complicated enough... the road to your cure should not be.
There are amazing advances in science and healthcare every day. However, it is still the final delivery of that care which determines whether or not the intervention was truly successful. In fact, any amount of medical knowledge and skill becomes limited if:
- Patients and physicians cannot easily communicate with each other when they need to do so.
- Physicians do not work collaboratively when the situation demands it.
- Medical data is not easily available to the right people at the right time and in the right format.
It has been estimated that 60 to 70 percent of adverse events in healthcare occur due to poor communication, whether between physicians and patients or amongst physicians themselves. These types of problems would not be tolerated in other industries. That is why successful companies, from industries that range from real estate and investment banking to telecommunications and video games, invest heavily in the development of innovative ways to ensure they can consistently perform their missions better, faster and cheaper. We believe it is time for healthcare to start doing the same.
Focusing on the Tough Issues
With these issues in mind, the Szollosi Healthcare Innovation Program will initially focus on two critical areas in today's healthcare environment: Information Sharing and Information Visualization. Furthermore, we will more specifically deal with the optimization of these areas during situations of complex and urgent medical needs, in which a patient may have to deal with multiple providers overseeing a wide array of diagnostic and treatment options. And we will always remember that each patient is their own unique individual.
An Evolutionary Process
For this program to succeed, we will start by launching projects in these areas of interest which demonstrate how innovative thinking and technologies can make a difference in healthcare. By studying and solving problems in these initial areas, we then plan to evolve our organization and culture for future successes in an expanding number of projects over time.