Innovation in healthcare

Innovation to improve services, teaching and research. A team from PwC Brazil worked with São Paulo’s largest medical school to develop and implement an innovation centre which is leading the way for healthcare across Brazil.

Setting the scene

Founded in 1944, the University of São Paulo’s Hospital das Clínicas Medical School (HC) is a renowned centre of excellence in teaching, research and assistance in Brazil’s health sector. In 2017, HC decided it needed to invest in innovation to reinvent itself, improve its processes and enhance the service it delivers to its end-users—the public at large. To achieve this, HC needed to turn its innovation purpose into reality by designing and building an innovation centre that would lead the way for healthcare across Brazil. For help in devising the operational, commercial and market models for the innovation centre, HC turned to PwC Brazil.

How we helped

The PwC team tackled the project in two phases. The first involved listening carefully to key stakeholders, including the HC faculty itself and various external parties. This enabled the team to map current gaps in innovation, and come up with suggestions on how to catalyse and foster innovative ideas to improve care, teaching and research, by connecting public and private individuals and institutions.

Armed with this information, the PwC team was able to diagnose the points that could be modernised in the institution, with three objectives in view: first, incubating ideas for creating improved services and experiences for patients; second, stimulating entrepreneurship and innovation; and third, generating innovative products and services. Keeping these goals in mind, the project team defined processes, metrics, governance and an organisational structure for innovation at HC, and suggested the characteristics of the executives and analysts who should run the innovation centre.

In the second phase of the project, PwC helped HC to transform its innovation centre to prioritise, select and develop the most relevant innovation projects. This transformation took into account the wider ecosystem of which HC is a member, and addressed issues such as prioritisation of the project portfolio, financing sources and organisational culture.

Impact and potential

The project delivered administrative and operational benefits in a very short timeframe, through advances such as the digitalisation of the logistics management for drugs and materials. This improvement allowed the relocation of 150 employees to focus on serving patients.

In addition, 200 lines of outstanding academic research have been mapped across the HC complex. To date, four of these have been identified as the basis for start-up ventures, helping to ensure the continuity of the research. The intention is that innovative health services will be announced to the market in 2018/2019, always retaining the distinctive HC “DNA". Also, it’s already possible to see some improvements in patient care through innovation, such as the implementation of facial recognition totems to facilitate access to HC for patients' carers.