“It is vital to think big in order to facilitate others”

Martin Curley, Director, HSE Director of Digital Transformation and Open Innovation , is an industry executive as well as an innovation professor at Maynooth University in Ireland who successfully bridges the gap between industry and academia, innovating improvement and solutions through his expertise. Curley is the creator of Open Innovation 2.0 (OI2), a cutting-edge digital innovation methodology that explains how to use digital technology to create structural transformation in a sector. Co-founder of the Innovation Value Institute and author of eight books on Innovation and Technology, he has taught executives all around the world on these topics.

Curley is also the developer of the Stay Left, Shift Left concept, a new paradigm for creating cohesive, collaborative, and linked healthcare transformations, which deliver solutions which create transformative 10X benefits often in each dimension of the quadruple aim; better outcomes, lower cost, better quality of life and better patient/clinician experience.

“ Continuous Lifelong learning for clinicians and patients is essential to improve health outcomes ”

Taking on the challenge of transforming the Irish Health Service through Digital Technology, Curley recognized that awareness and education were the first steps in such an audacious transformation. He recognized that a broad spectrum of people would need to be educated spanning beyond the boundaries of the HSE organizations to patients and indeed the full ecosystem. With the support of the HSE CEO, Curley created the HSE Digital Academy in 2019.

He first prioritized training Digital Leaders and enlisted the support of key executive leaders in the HSE organization to get backing for creation of a new transformational Masters. He envisioned a new kind of Masters in Digital Health Transformation, where clinicians would learn by doing and deliver real change by being required to deliver a digital change project. Curley pulled together the leading Digital Health Academics in the country and quickly got agreement from the eight Irish Universities to co-design and co-deliver the New Masters (a first of a kind collaboration in Ireland). The first cohort of Masters Students mentored by UL Academic Annette McElligott delivered 20 digital change projects with remarkably eighteen of the projects being viable.

With digital health changing so quickly, Curley recognized the need for a new kind of education – an industry diploma on Digital Health Futures, which was co-conceived and co-created with Dell Technologies (led by Ryan Heynes). The course was designed to help educate clinicians to become Digital Catalysts to support the broad digital change movement needed. A target was set for 300 registrations but this was well exceeded when over 1500 clinicians registered for the first industry diploma. The Diploma is accredited by the Health Informatics Society of Ireland. Additionally digital training offerings from firms like Microsoft, Cisco, and Salesforce were added to the HSE Digital Academy.

Curley also recognized the need to educate the entire health ecosystem. His OI2 paradigm is about rapid learning, networking and experimentation in a high trust ecosystem to rapidly creates new digital solutions aligned with a shared vision (StayLeft, ShiftLeft) which create shared value (Wellbeing, Welfare and Wealth). He envisioned a new kind of ecosystem learning venue, the Digital Academy Forum (DAF), with a format similar to TED where key thought and practice leaders would provide stimulating 15-minute keynotes, which would educate and ignite the ecosystem. The first DAF was launched in September 2019 by the HSE CEO Paul Reid and executed in collaboration with his colleagues Lorraine Smyth and Ross Cullen. The HSE DAF won the Irish Healthcare Award for best educational meeting in 2020.

Recognizing that Health Literacy has a huge impact on patient health outcomes Curley has focussed with colleagues on providing relevant and real-time information to assist patients in improving their health. He worked with Una Kearns, CEO of MyPatientsSpace and leading Irish Clinicians such as Dr Donal Sexton and Dr David Kane to provide patient apps for Renal and Rheumatology patients, which provide real-time communication, health data and education to patients to help them better manage themselves.

Curley recognized that the patient community is a great source of generating, learning and sharing information to improve health. He worked with Thomas Coleman of Zendra Health, his colleague Jim McGrane and Gary Boyle, a leading Parkinson’s patient advocate in Ireland to show how a medical grade app could be created in a matter of weeks to better support and inform the community of Parkinson’s patients.

Together with Prof Colin Doherty of St James Hospital and his colleague Des O’Toole, Curley has helped spearhead a new platform for a Learning Health System which is being co-developed together with IBM and Salesforce and includes empowering Epilepsy patients to improve their health through a personalized patient portal.

In a world where medical knowledge is estimated to be doubling every 73 days and where digital technologies continue to reliably follow Moore’s Law, Curley believes that continuous life long, real-time learning for clinicians and patients alike is both an imperative and possible. IE