Creating a knowledge platform for improving healthcare

Summary

The challenge

The VA operates the nation’s largest healthcare system, called the Veterans Healthcare Administration (VHA). It consists of 150 medical centers and nearly 1,400 community-based outpatient clinics, community living centers, Vet centers, and domiciliary. Together, these healthcare facilities, and the more than 53,000 licensed healthcare practitioners, provide comprehensive care to more than 8.3 million veterans each year.

When proven healthcare innovations emerge in one or more of the VHA’s operations, how do you systematically identify and spread their adoption across the VHA’s healthcare delivery network? That’s the challenge the VA has been facing, and it’s an important one to solve given the life-saving implications.

The solution

In collaboration with Agile Six, we’ve been working with the VHA to address this challenge through the delivery of a knowledge management platform called the Diffusion Marketplace. The purpose of this platform is to empower VHA practitioners and other employees to identify and disseminate promising healthcare innovations.

We aligned our delivery approach to the VA’s Digital Service Handbook and focused our initial product strategy on figuring out how to design an experience that would lead to the wider adoption of three tried and tested life-saving and cost-saving innovations (e.g., rapid naloxone delivery). These innovations have already been proven to work at a small subset of the VHA’s healthcare facilities.

After validating our primary design solution through research and prototyping, we rapidly iterated toward the release of beta and production versions of the platform — with an initial collection of 50 innovations.

Following production launch, our team has focused on continually improving the platform, including:

• Expanding the number of innovations and the rate at which they’re adopted
• Developing a new innovation editor feature that empowers innovation editors to update their content directly and helps ensure the site has the most up-to-date information
• Improving the home and search experience to balance the competing needs of targeted searches with exploratory browsing
• Launching a public version of the site to share cutting-edge VA innovations to a wider audience
• Launching a community feature to highlight news, events, and publications related to virtual reality and augmented reality treatments

I had no idea the VA had as many programs as they do. The Marketplace is a great resource for Veterans. A lot of Vets end up with addiction problems and this could really save lives. The stuff you all are working on can really make a difference.

U.S. Veteran

Our innovators are grateful that they can now share their work with partners outside the VA, and we continue to hear from VA leadership how proud they are to tell everyone about the Marketplace.

The results

• Delivered an alpha version of the platform within two months
• Launched a beta version with a small user base in the summer of 2019
• Launched a public version of the platform in fall of 2021 with an initial collection of 50 innovations
• Expanded the number of innovations accessible on the platform from 50 to 262 in total
• Facilitated 3,770 successful innovation adoptions across the VA health network