Patient-Centered Innovation: Involving Patients in Open Social Innovation.

Background: Involving patients in the health-care delivery innovation has many benefits. Open social innovation (OSI) presents a fitting lens to examine and advance patient engagement in innovation. OSI offers a participatory approach to innovation, in which diverse groups of participants collaboratively generate ideas and scale solutions on complex social challenges.

Mission possible: open innovation in nursing and patient care services at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Objectives: Although front-line nurses and staff are uniquely positioned to identify the inefficiencies and gaps in care delivery, formal processes are not always in place to hear from those very employees.

Design: We established a scalable process that embodies open innovation principles, to broaden and distribute the innovation locus.

Setting: Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA.

Engaging frontline employees using innovation contests: Lessons from Massachusetts General Hospital.

In this article, we describe how innovation contests-a vehicle to crowdsource ideas and problem-solving efforts-propelled frontline employees to exert discretionary efforts in organizational problem-solving at Massachusetts General Hospital. As designers and administrators of four innovation contests in three disease centers, we share firsthand knowledge of how the contests enabled clinicians and administrative staff, whose primary job is delivering high-quality patient care, to become involved in ideation, selection, and implementation of their own ideas. We describe the processes that we designed and implemented, ideas that these processes generated, and findings from interviewing employees about their experiences afterwards.

Realignment treatment for medial tibiofemoral osteoarthritis: randomised trial.

Objectives: The objective of this 30-week randomised crossover trial was to determine whether a multi-modal realignment treatmentwould be successful in relieving pain and improving function among persons with medial tibiofemoral osteoarthritis (OA).

Methods: The authors conducted a double-blind randomised crossover trial of a multi-modal realignment treatment for medial tibiofemoral OA. Trial participants met American College of Rheumatology criteria for OA, with knee pain, aching or stiffness on most days of the past month and radiographic evidence of a definite osteophyte with predominant medial tibiofemoral OA.

Knee alignment does not predict incident osteoarthritis: the Framingham osteoarthritis study.

Objective: To examine the relationship of knee malalignment to the occurrence of knee osteoarthritis (OA) among subjects without radiographic OA at baseline to determine whether malalignment is a risk factor for incident disease or simply a marker of increasing disease severity.

Methods: We selected 110 incident tibiofemoral (TF) OA case knees (76 subjects) and 356 random control knees (178 subjects) from among participants in the Framingham Osteoarthritis Study. Case knees did not have OA at baseline (1992-1994 examination) but had developed OA (Kellgren/Lawrence grade>or=2) at followup (2002-2005 examination) (mean of 8.