Health Care Innovation: Fast Enough to Save Lives, Safe Enough to Protect Them

• Health care innovation must balance speed with precision by learning quickly from mistakes, scaling only when solutions are ready, and intentionally building trust with patients at every step.
• Even as technology advances, health care innovation will only succeed if people adopt it, making behavior change, trust, and continuous feedback essential to delivering real impact.
• Health care innovation requires strong collaboration across sectors and a future-ready talent pipeline equipped with the skills, adaptability, and mindset to meet evolving needs.

Health care leaders in Michigan are grappling with how to rapidly deploy emerging technologies like AI and precision medicine while balancing risk, building trust, and ensuring care remains human-centered.

View the full video below.

Speaking to the risks of moving too quickly with health care innovation, Anthony Chang of BAMF Health noted the delicate balance required between maintaining both direction and confidence.

“The right way is looking forward, be confident, control your speed, control your direction, and then you’ve got to get a lot of confidence, and you’ve got to gain a lot of experience with the build up of the experience and the confidence, then you can really achieve what we want to achieve.”

At the same time, Chang emphasized that progress inherently involves some level of trial and error and underscored the importance of refining before scaling as a solution.

“In order to move things forward, it takes mistakes moving forward,” he said. “If we can keep trying to facilitate the process and get the right answer first, and then we can scale it up, that’s actually where we should focus.”

Building on this, Anika Gardenhire of Michigan Medicine highlighted the growing importance of trust in an era of widespread access to information.

“I think we have to be purposeful about implementing these solutions in ways that build trust between individuals and their providers, versus degrade trust between individuals and their providers,” she said. “A lot of it comes from how you source information, how you provide information, and the importance of brand and institutional value to our consumers,” she stated.

Speaking to what must remain constant in health care amid rapid technological advancement, Gardenhire emphasized the ongoing importance of change management to get people to adopt new behaviors and embrace new solutions. As she put it, the challenge is getting people to do “something different today than they did yesterday because the solution exists.”

“If this isn’t true, then the things that we’re making don’t matter, right?” She asked. “If we want them to matter, we still have to do the very human work of adoption.”

Even as the pace of innovation accelerates, there is a risk of losing sight of the human element. Laura Lee McIntyre of Michigan State University highlighted the importance of staying grounded in feedback and connection.

“It makes sense to keep talking to one another, keep checking in with our patients, keep checking in with our students, keep checking in with our consumers, and being open to that feedback, rather than being committed to a set of actions that we may need to modify,” she said.

With rapid technological advancement in health care, one thing remains clear: progress cannot happen in silos. As Chang emphasized, collaboration is essential.

“If we can work with each other and make sure we all align on patient care being our end goal, then we can achieve it at a high speed and really achieve the true position as well,” he said.

That collaboration must also extend to how future talent is prepared. McIntyre highlighted the importance of aligning education with industry needs. And looking ahead, preparing the future health care workforce requires anticipating what’s next, not just what exists today. To navigate that uncertainty, McIntyre stressed the importance of foundational skills and mindset,

“Higher education has to prepare not only students for the jobs we know now, and the technologies that you all are introducing, but for the jobs that we don’t even know exist yet,” McIntyre explained. “We need to instill the values, ethics, skill set, curiosity, and exploration that are necessary for students to be future taxpayers and drivers of our economy in the state of Michigan.”

This session was sponsored by the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation.