Exploring the Role of Complexity in Health Care Technology Bottom-Up Innovations: Multiple-Case Study Using the Nonadoption, Abandonment, Scale-Up, Spread, and Sustainability Complexity Assessment Tool

TL;DR

This study explores how complexity affects the success of bottom-up digital health innovations using a framework called NASSS, highlighting the importance of organizational readiness and adaptive leadership.

Contribution

The study applies the NASSS complexity assessment tool to bottom-up digital health innovations, revealing insights into organizational and contextual challenges.

Findings

Complexity in digital health innovations often lies outside the innovation itself, related to organizational readiness and financing.

Adaptive leadership and nonlinear approaches are crucial for successful innovation in complex healthcare settings.

The NASSS framework helps identify factors that facilitate or hinder innovation adoption and spread.

Abstract

New digital technology presents new challenges to health care on multiple levels. There are calls for further research that considers the complex factors related to digital innovations in complex health care settings to bridge the gap when moving from linear, logistic research to embracing and testing the concept of complexity. The nonadoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread, and sustainability (NASSS) framework was developed to help study complexity in digital innovations.

This study aims to investigate the role of complexity in the development and deployment of innovations by retrospectively assessing challenges to 4 digital health care innovations initiated from the bottom up.

A multicase retrospective, deductive, and explorative analysis using the NASSS complexity assessment tool LONG was conducted. In total, 4 bottom-up innovations developed in Region Västra Götaland in Sweden were explored and compared to identify unique and shared complexity-related challenges.

The analysis resulted in joint insights and individual learning. Overall, the complexity was mostly found outside the actual innovation; more specifically, it related to the organization’s readiness to integrate new innovations, how to manage and maintain innovations, and how to finance them. The NASSS framework sheds light on various perspectives that can either facilitate or hinder the adoption, scale-up, and spread of technological innovations. In the domain of condition or diagnosis, a well-informed understanding of the complexity related to the condition or illness (diabetes, cancer, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia disorders) is of great importance for the innovation. The value proposition needs to be clearly described early to enable an understanding of costs and outcomes. The questions in the NASSS complexity assessment tool LONG were sometimes difficult to comprehend, not only from a language perspective but also due to a lack of understanding of the surrounding organization’s system and its setting.

Even when bottom-up innovations arise within the same support organization, the complexity can vary based on the developmental phase and the unique characteristics of each project. Identifying, defining, and understanding complexity may not solve the issues but substantially improves the prospects for successful deployment. Successful innovation within complex organizations necessitates an adaptive leadership and structures to surmount cultural resistance and organizational impediments. A rigid, linear, and stepwise approach risks disregarding interconnected variables and dependencies, leading to suboptimal outcomes. Success lies in embracing the complexity with its uncertainty, nurturing creativity, and adopting a nonlinear methodology that accommodates the iterative nature of innovation processes within complex organizations.

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