National Consortium for Innovativeness in Health Care

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The purpose of the National Consortium for Innovativeness in Health Care is to advance Innovativeness Across Academia and Practice for Health Care Progress Scale (IA-APHPS) in 5 ways:

  1. Shorten the scale and define the cutoff scores for low, medium, or high relational and/or structural components.
  2. Conduct interventions and longitudinal studies to assess outcome measures and changes in innovativeness over time.
  3. Examine innovativeness levels between different geographical regions, types of healthcare organizations, or educational institutions can be compared to identify factors contributing to variations.
  4. Researchers can develop predictive models using innovativeness scores to forecast healthcare outcomes or the success of collaborative initiatives.
  5. Generate funding to conduct additional research.
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Graphic that reads: IA-APHPS - The first validated scale of healthcare and partnership innovations.
Read the JONA article

Interdisciplinary team creates first validated scale of healthcare and partnership innovations, consortium to further innovation

Monday, July 15, 2024

Innovation is integral to maximizing nursing impact, and often stems from academic-practice partnerships. A new scale developed by the University of Iowa College of Nursing Innovation Scholarly Interest Group (SIG) is the first validated measure to facilitate innovations across academia and practice. Members of the Innovation SIG involved in development of the scale include Drs. Joseph, Bair, Chae, and St. Marie of the College of Nursing; Dr. Williams and PhD student Reinke from the Tippie College of Business; and Dr. Hanrahan of University of Iowa Health Care. The team recently published an article in the Journal of Nursing Administration about their work. 

In their article, the team describes a historic disconnect between academia and practice with regards to prioritizing and strategizing for innovativeness*. The lack of a framework beyond theoretical models highlighted the need for a diagnostic tool and led to development of the Innovativeness Across Academia and Practice for Healthcare Progress Scale (IA-APHPS). 

To create the IA-APHPS, the team first drafted and validated a bank of survey items, before pilot testing the validated measure. Over 1000 nurses in academia and practice at five sites across the United States participated in the IRB-approved study. The resulting IA-APHPS consists of 3 relational, 2 structural, and 2 impact domains.

The IA-APHPS “allows academia, practice, and industry nurses to strategically leverage synergy, increase capacity, improve our potential, and reduce partnering constraints,” Dr. Joseph writes in her guest editorial in the same issue of the Journal of Nursing Administration. “The next step is to advance the field's knowledge about innovation using more quantitative approaches.” 

To facilitate next steps, the team at Iowa is establishing an IA-APHPS Consortium to distribute the measure, gather data, gain knowledge, and build on the research. If you are interested in using the measure and joining the consortium, please contact Dr. Joseph at maria-joseph@uiowa.edu.

*Innovativeness is defined as a social process for the generation, acceptance, and implementation of new processes, products, or services for the first time in an organizational setting.