EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Medical innovations often demonstrate strong clinical benefit in trials, but achieving the same value in real-world care settings requires more than adoption alone.

Downstream improvements such as reduced health care utilization, improved efficiency, or avoided costs often depend on changes in workflows, behaviors, and decision-making across the patient journey. Without these practice changes, even clinically effective innovations may fail to deliver their full value.

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Practice Change is What Unlocks Value Beyond Clinical Outcomes

Clinical trials establish that an innovation can improve outcomes under controlled conditions. In real-world practice, however, realizing downstream outcomes is more complex.

For example, a diagnostic or digital tool that delivers information faster can only improve health resource utilization outcomes if clinicians receive the information at the right time and understand how to act on it within existing workflows. If results are delayed, unclear, or disconnected from decision-making, the clinical and economic benefits are diminished.

To realize the full value of innovation, health systems often need to:

• Redesign workflows and care pathways
• Align stakeholders across departments and settings of care
• Integrate new tools into existing systems
• Support adoption through training, communication, and measurement

When these elements are missing, innovations may be implemented—but not used in a way that drives meaningful impact.

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Real-world Examples of Practice Change Enabling Value

Medtech companies that successfully demonstrate the value of their innovations invest in structured change management with health system stakeholders that are implementing their technologies.

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‍CASE STUDY 1: Redesigning screening workflows to address system constraints

An integrated health system facing significant procedural backlogs for colorectal cancer screening introduced an alternative at-home testing approach for lower-risk patients. Realizing value required coordinated practice changes, including:

• Securing specialist buy-in by using data to demonstrate capacity constraints and the need to prioritize higher-risk patients
• Developing new workflows to stratify patients and support appropriate follow-up
• Standardizing communication across the care team
• Using ongoing performance monitoring and leadership reviews to identify barriers and optimize workflows

These changes helped improve access and efficiency through the use of the new test while ensuring resources were allocated to patients with the greatest need.

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CASE STUDY 2: Embedding rapid diagnostics into frontline care workflows

In another setting, a rapid diagnostic innovation was paired with intentional workflow redesign to ensure results could influence real-time decisions for patients experiencing sepsis. Practice changes included:

• Assessing current-state workflows to identify gaps in decision-making
• Updating protocols to support earlier identification and action
• Providing targeted training across clinical, operational, and support teams
• Establishing continuous monitoring and feedback loops to refine processes

Together, these changes enabled improvements in efficiency, resource utilization, and clinical decision-making.

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CASE STUDY 3: Improving medication safety through barcode medication administration (BCMA)

Many health systems implemented barcode medication administration technology to reduce medication errors and improve patient safety. Early implementations often delivered minimal impact, as the technology was layered onto existing workflows without meaningful changes to clinical practice. Realizing value required coordinated practice changes across nursing, pharmacy, and clinical teams, including:

• Redesigning medication administration workflows to support consistent bedside scanning
• Standardizing medication labeling and packaging to ensure compatibility with barcode scanning
• Integrating BCMA into EHR documentation and clinical decision support processes
• Providing targeted training to address workflow changes and reduce workarounds
• Monitoring scanning compliance and safety outcomes to support continuous improvement

Once these practice changes were in place, health systems observed meaningful reductions in medication administration errors, fewer adverse drug events, and associated cost savings from avoided harm, rework, and extended hospital stays.

These examples illustrate that value is often unlocked not by the innovation alone, but by the systems built around it.

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Practice Change Aligns Stakeholders and Incentives

Practice change plays a critical role in aligning incentives across stakeholders. When workflows support timely action and outcomes are measured across the patient journey, value becomes visible and shared across settings of care.

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Best practices for enabling practice change to realize value include:

‍Engage stakeholders early and across functions through a formal governance structure:

Form a cross-functional steering committee that includes clinical leaders, frontline staff, operational teams, quality improvement leaders, and data and analytics partners to align on goals, roles, constraints, and success criteria.

Assess current-state workflows before implementation:

Map existing clinical, operational, and patient management workflows to identify where changes are required and where barriers to adoption may arise.

Embed innovation into existing systems and processes:

Integrate new tools into established systems—such as EHRs, care management platforms, or operational workflows—so they fit naturally into day-to-day practice.

Invest in training and change support:

Provide targeted education and ongoing support so teams understand not only how to use the innovation, but how it changes care delivery.

Measure impact and share results:

Partner with quality improvement or analytics teams to monitor outcomes, identify opportunities for improvement, and regularly communicate results to stakeholders.

When these best practices are applied, innovations are more likely to achieve adoption, align incentives, and deliver measurable, system-wide value.

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What's Next in This Series

In Part 3, Demonstrating the Value of Innovation Across Settings of Care: Aligning on the Right Approach to Measure Impact, we will explore how selecting the right clinical, operational, and utilization metrics is essential to capturing the full value of innovation. Aligning on meaningful measures supports outcomes-based contracting and value-based reimbursement models.

Together, these articles show that defining value, enabling practice change, and measuring impact are interconnected and necessary to demonstrate how innovation delivers lasting benefit across the health care system.

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‍Eva Baginska is Senior Director, Value and Access at Alkemi. She helps life sciences teams turn clinical results into clear value for each stakeholder, so treatments earn access and adoption across settings of care.

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Citations:

Case Study 1: Our Approach to Change - Cytovale

Case Study 2: Geisinger Health System

Case study 3: Grailey K, Hussain R, Wylleman E, et al. Understanding the facilitators and barriers to barcode medication administration by nursing staff using behavioural science frameworks. BMC Nursing. 2023;22:378.

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