Impact assessment for Healthcare Social Innovations

A topic I have grappled with many years now, impact investing in social innovations still remains as nebulous a field as ever. Even though the pace of social innovations is on the rise, issues around determining their potential impact still remain a bone of contention between the funders and the social enterprises.

Investors on one hand face difficulties in identifying bench-marking metrics and comparative analysis literature about the impact achieved, while entrepreneurs face challenges around reporting and translating impact data in a credible format. Having worked as a healthcare consultant, I often found myself in situations where I wondered how could I effectively harness the potential of the social innovation for its expansion in the under-served regions. Would impact be determined in terms of the healthcare trifecta of access, cost and quality or any other metrics need to be accounted for a comprehensive evaluation. As the impact is subjective and can be attributed to more than one factors, new approaches are thus being devised in order to make the impact assessment more nuanced. An article that I found in the Stanford Social Innovation Review ‘Setting the Stage to Measure Impact in Health’ was particularly enlightening as it focused on the development of standardized definitions for common measures of performance tracked by healthcare organizations serving low-income communities. The framework demonstrates how the delivery of affordable care services to the poor can be attributed to the measurement of social, environmental and financial performance of the investment. In order to test the soundness of the framework, I tried to extrapolate the learnings from the framework onto a host of telemedicine service innovations, a field which is poised to be disruptive in the way care is delivered remotely. Aiming to critically evaluate along the proposed metrics, the points are enumerated herein –

1.     Choose from within the catalog of metrics - Multiple metrics from reduction of travel time, increase in quality of life to average length of stay in healthcare facilities are metrics that can selected from a larger cohort as they are the most germane to the services provided.

2.     Adapt metrics to specific healthcare activities -  Depending on whether it is a product company or an e-health service provider, the metrics must be attuned to the type of activities it is engaged in.

3.     Use the metrics to measure outputs and, ultimately, outcomes - Depending on the organization and the investor, the metrics must be correlated to health care outcomes so as to bolster the case for health economic benefits for a potentially larger patient base.

4.     Use metrics to help identify successful health organizations - Determining comparable key performance indicators from multiple sources such as WHO and World Bank literature will help demonstrate impact and compare performance to similar organizations. Standardized e-health organization performance metrics can help increase the pace of investments in this burgeoning field and multiple social impact.

Thus, the soundness of the framework is indicative that they are indeed a revolutionary way of judging the socio-economic impact of the investments in the healthcare sector, which would come to the aid of the various stakeholders in the healthcare industry. Such developments are indeed going to be game changers in the way funds are channelized to serve the healthcare needs of the largely underserved populace.

References:

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/setting_the_stage_to_measure_impact_in_health

http://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/b10f4080498391e2865cd6336b93d75f/IFC_Support2Health_WEB.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CACHEID=b10f4080498391e2865cd6336b93d75f