Organizational Routines and Healthcare Innovation

The chapter leverages theory on organizational routines from organization science to advance understanding of how healthcare organizations search for new, improved ways of doing healthcare tasks and make these process innovations stick, overcoming an important barrier to healthcare innovation. Improving healthcare outcomes, be it through the adoption of new technologies or improved organization, often requires innovation or more fundamentally, changing practices and ways of working. However, changing existing ways of working is often challenging, as is implementing the new ways of working so employees reliably use them. Building on an overview of what organizational routines are and what roles they play not just in hindering but also enabling innovation in healthcare, the chapter identifies tensions underlying healthcare innovation that become apparent when considering it as innovation in organizational routines, as well as implications and future directions for managing healthcare innovation.