Cameron Campbell isn’t one to sit still. His spare time is spent doing things like taking his one-year old son on camping trips and preparing for an eight-day 400-kilometre run through the Scottish Highlands – that country’s toughest race.
“I like those kinds of activities that test you, where the competition is really yourself. I’ll never be the fastest runner, but I’m often the last person standing. Activities that challenge your own mindset are the ones I enjoy most.”
And that’s the attitude that brought him to the Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub as Interim Executive Director.
The Health Innovation Hub is pivotal to transforming the delivery of health care in Nova Scotia, Campbell believes. “We have an incredible team that’s come together in a very short period of time to help move and scale innovation across the health system. Our aim is to continue to empower this team – and the front-line staff they work with – to continue to grow and do amazing work, and that will often mean getting out of the way and letting these smart people do their jobs.”
He also has key targets in mind for the Health Innovation Hub, including working with those across the system to test and try innovations that can help drive improvements for patients and employees. “That’s sometimes going to mean trying things that don’t work and saying, ‘We learned a lot from that and we’re not going to do anymore of it,’ then moving on to things that are successful and saying, ‘We’re going to do more of this.’”
Campbell sees the Health Innovation Hub as facilitating cutting-edge advancements while also looking at what processes and policies need to change to find better ways of doing things. And it’s critical to support and coach innovators – including clinicians, frontline staff, and start-up founders – so they have both the mindset and the skillset to find the path to make their innovative idea a success.
As a small team in a huge system, “We want to be a catalyst for change. We can show that it is possible to make innovative change in the system and empower others to do it.”
What really energizes Campbell about this job is the opportunity to have broad impact across the health system. This ranges from helping to improve processes, leveraging frontline expertise to make impactful change, and implementation of new technologies or solutions. It also includes both the ability to support the scale of great ideas internally and the export of those ideas and products to other health systems. “We want to be part of the success story of bringing new solutions and technologies into the health space and trying them here and finessing them here, and then scaling them so that our population is the first to benefit.”
While achieving benefits around healthcare, Campbell sees the Health Innovation Hub’s role as also developing and realizing economic benefits and creating jobs here in Nova Scotia, rather than seeing these opportunities exported to major centres.
Through his previous work in both the private and public sector, Campbell developed a unique skill set that prepared him well for this job.
Campbell found himself drawn to digital transformation, and how these initiatives enable innovation in the system. “I wanted to learn more about how digital transformation can enable better patient care and reduce – rather than increase – burden on our frontline providers.”
As a consultant, he worked on technology transformation, implementation, and strategy for the healthcare sector. Before that, he had worked for various levels of government, in the post-secondary sector, and for a provincial medical association. While with the provincial government, he helped implement those very policies.
“In my previous roles I had the opportunity to work on very diverse portfolios including primary health care and family practice renewal and then expanded to take on roles around chronic disease, cancer screening, ambulance services, remote monitoring, virtual care, and electronic medical records.”
These opportunities gave him increasing insight into the way technology changes the way health care is delivered, or should change the way health care is delivered, translating into better patient care.
Cultivating excellence on the frontlines is a major focus of the Health Innovation Hub team. Campbell says ultimately the innovative solutions being tested and tried today will build and empower connected care teams as respected entrepreneurs and innovators who have the information, technology and tools they need to provide a high standard of care that Nova Scotians deserve.
