St Josephs Health Launches Innovation Center with Nicholson Foundation Grant

The Nicholson Foundation has provided St. Joseph’s Health, a safety net hospital in Paterson, a grant to support the development and implementation of an Innovation Center.  Launching April 1, 2019, the Center will bring together staff from across the organization to use the tools of innovation and Human Centered Design to improve patient care and wellness in their community.

St. Joseph’s Health is one of the busiest safety net hospitals in New Jersey, with 5,000 employees handling 35,000 inpatient admissions and 1.7 million outpatient visits annually.

Innovation Centers are designed to be catalysts for continuous innovation at an organization.  Staff are brought together across disciplines to work with innovation coaches, who use the principles of Human Centered Design to help the staff think in new ways to solve problems. The model allows for rapid prototyping and testing of new ideas before they are used in patient care or in the community.

Before the launch of the Center, leadership at St. Joseph’s Health took part in an intensive 6-month planning process with The Nicholson Foundation.  The group conducted a site visit to Columbus Regional Health in Columbus, Indiana – the site of a nationally-recognized, hospital-based Innovation Center.  Team members also attended training in Human Centered Design, and explored different models of innovation at various organizations.

The ultimate goal of the project is to provide solutions to improve the health of the Paterson community.  St. Joseph’s leadership plans to share learnings from the project and make the Innovation Center a model for other hospitals in New Jersey.