Mobilizing engineering, management, and medicine

While CERC begins recruiting the world’s most distinguished pioneers in high value care design, the heart and soul of the CERC innovation process are talented and committed “young inventors”. Six are selected each year to design and help launch multi-state pilot tests of innovative care delivery methods. Design teams – physicians who have completed residency training and postdoctoral fellows from engineering and management sciences – use disciplined innovation development methods to design and demonstrate “double win” care delivery innovations that both lower per capita health spending and improve patient outcomes.

To structure their search for solutions, CERC adapted the Stanford Biodesign innovation design method, which has already spawned more than 300 patents and 24 medical technology companies. The method teaches young inventors to identify the most pressing unmet patient and clinician needs.
CERC fellows analyze categories of health care that consume the most U.S. health spending from onset to end game, and then design, demonstrate, and disseminate less costly care delivery methods that better serve the unmet needs of patients, patient families, and their clinicians.

To discern unmet needs, CERC fellows have local access to the hospitals at Stanford as well as a national network of already highly efficient health systems which participate in pilot testing of new CERC-designed care models. To assess their effect at scale, CERC partners with large health care payers to conduct multi-site trials after successful pilot testing.

Propelled by new clinician incentives for value from public and private health care purchasers, the Stanford Clinical Excellence Research Center aims to serve as a national value-of-care accelerator of more affordable paths to the best possible clinical outcomes.

Clinical Excellence Research Center
Another Stanford National "Accelerator"

  1. Design: Diverse teams design and forecast gains from innovative care models
  2. Demonstrate: Divers health systems implement and refine innovative care models
  3. Disseminate: Private sector preps innovative care models for national spread by clinicians and payers