Hi, I'm mtthw.As in Matthew Miller, innovation leader with experience in the Canadian healthcare system.I am attracted to worthy causes and principled teams with the heart and means to achieve the near impossible.
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About
Matthew Miller is an innovative and people-centred executive leader with 20+ years leading digital transformation, brand and innovation initiatives, and culture change in complex healthcare systems.Skilled in creating value through strategy, high-performance team building, and delivering design-driven, system-focused integrated solutions.Known for advancing human-centred design and embedding culturally safe learning and innovation through successful participatory design event series such as:
And for championing career-changing research and education initiatives for care providers and health leaders through partnerships with:
Leadership
What does health innovation leadership look like?The ability to succeed and fail forward with hypotheses and experimentation, to bring people along the journey to success, and to champion positive change within an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA).Below are four of my successful and popular examples of health innovation leadership. Of course it takes a cracker jack team to make this all happen. I am grateful for my talented colleagues and partners.
1. Code Hack
Annual health hackathon series
Role: InstigatorVision: Position Island Health, a BC Health Authority with 30,000 employees, as an innovative place to work, one with the ability to solve real world health challenges.Guiding principle: Anyone can be an innovator.Goal: Design, lead, support, and sustain culture-changing grassroots innovation efforts and practices with patients, staff, physicians, designers, and developers.Driver: Establish an Innovation Lab and hackathon series to foster a culturally safe culture of innovation.Outcome: Code Hack hackathon and the Innovation Lab are listed as best practice examples in the Government of Canada Nurse Retention Toolkit.
View the Code Hack trailer. Volume up!
Results: Supported by 40+ volunteers, vendors, academic partners, and community sponsors, Code Hack is an influential and inspiring annual 24-hour health hackathon where up to 100 staff, nurses, patients, physicians, designers, developers, and executives try to convince a team of strangers (who become fast friends) to collaborate on their proposed wicked healthcare problem, then pitch their prototypes to a panel of judges.Winning teams receive cash prizes and are invited to participate in a 6-month start-up learning cohort in an innovation lab setting.
Sponsors and community supporters include:
AWS
BC Ministry of Health
CGI
Camosun Innovates
Doctors of BC
Health Quality BC
Fasken
Michael Smith Foundation
Mural
Nurses & Nurse Practitioners of BC
Patient Voices Network
TELUS & TELUS Health
UVIC Innovation Centre
Victoria Hospitals Foundation
From Island Health's press release:"I love the Code Hack tagline: ‘Everyone is an innovator’,” said Kathy MacNeil, Island Health President and Chief Executive Officer.“We need that now more than ever. Bringing diverse minds together is the way forward and experiencing the energy at Code Hack fills me with hope for the future.”
View the Code Hack event website
2. Spark Series
Multi-day in-person design thinking events focused on wicked health care and community issues.
Role: InstigatorWhat: Multi-day in-person design thinking event
- Understand a specific “wicked” problem area
- Learn with professionals and peers
- Distill problems into opportunities
- Empathy mapping and ideation sessions
- Prototype solutions and presentation options
- Commit to moving forwardEvent series included:
- 2023 Toxic drug supply crisis in Nanaimo BC part 1
- 2024 Toxic drug supply crisis in Nanaimo BC part 2
- 2025 (planned) Alternate Levels of Care (ALC)Reference: SPARK Nanaimo: Looking at the Toxic Drug Crisis through a Different Lens"The aim behind the SPARK series... is location, activation and inclusion.Rather than tackling problems in the Innovation Lab or at Code Hack, we’re bringing the Lab’s design-thinking process into communities to explore opportunities with the people who are affected by, and who can most benefit from, potential solutions.”It’s a collaborative approach, which means communities and partners are jointly responsible for moving ideas forward."
Findings: See the supplementary report.
3. Walk With Me
Role: Thought partner, collaboratorWhat: Walk With Me (WWM) is a research-based harm reduction and knowledge mobilization organization based in Comox, BC, leading through cultural mapping, experiential walks, and circle dialogue workshops.
Why: While leading Island Health's Innovation Lab, I worked with Walk With Me over several years as a thought partner and internal and ministry champion.Their event-based approach to truth and reconciliation looks directly at the impacts of the ongoing toxic drug supply crisis in collaboration with people with lived and living experience.Outcome From the success of initial events, Walk With Me secured a contract with Island Health to deliver over 50 walks with frontline and executive staff. More than one clinical leader was heard to say the experience should be required training.
4. Culturally Committed
Role: Partner, championWhat: Culturally Committed is a year-long organizational membership program "facilitated by mentors, Elders, and experts in the field of cultural safety and humility, with the intention of supporting providers in expanding their knowledge around cultural practices, barriers to care, and to educate on what safe relationships looks and feels like to Indigenous Peoples."How: I enrolled a pilot group that included multiple Island Health portfolios including the Innovation Lab, Digital Engagement, Cultural Safety, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.Why: I was fortunate, as a white settler, to receive San'yas Indigenous Cultural Safety Training. It taught me how I might lead myself and others further into truth and reconciliation actions. When I found out about Culturally Committed, I knew right away this is exactly what was needed.Outcome: The Culturally Committed pilot immersed team members into a profound, life-changing learning experience. As a result, it created a system-wide opportunity to recommend further adoption by the health care executive team.
Balance
As in work-life balance. Things I do to be creative, engaged, mindful, and healthy.
Any time spent on a mountain forest trail, paddling an ocean kayak under a big sky, or racing a keelboat through strong winds fills me with gratitude, peace, and exuberance.
I'm also a creative founder at Easy Assembly and an indie musician. Get a glimpse below.
At Easy Assembly Co, I design cool tees and merch for legendary bands that don't exist. But should. Probably.Anyway, it's about having fun.Example: The Swift Tailors
View and shop
Using the stage name mtthw I write, record, and produce original music and stream on the major platforms.Should I? You be the judge.