Health care is infatuated with innovation. We’re awash in innovation conferences, organizations proclaiming innovation as a core value, newly minted Chief Innovation Officers, prizes for best innovation. We think innovation is great, but there’s a downside. When organizations overemphasize innovation, they can miss out on the power of imitation – copying existing approaches that actually work. Providers need to actively seek out good ideas that have been tried and refined, bring those ideas home, and adapt them for local use.

We’re not the first to have made this observation – in fact, we cannot remember who we stole it from. It may have been Jon Pryor, the CEO of Hennepin County Medical Center, who mused about appointing a Chief Imitation Officer for his organization – someone whose sole job was to look outside for good ideas to bring home. After all, an idea that has already worked somewhere else is more likely to be effective than one that is completely new and untried.

Accordingly, with our tongues only partially in cheek, we propose the formation of a new International Institute for Imitation (III, pronounced Ai-Ai-Ai). This Institute would play the role of information broker, providing an easily accessible (and shame free) resource for Chief Imitation Officers and other health care personnel willing to admit that they could use some outside help in improving their organization’s performance and solving its problems. It should be international because we know we might learn a thing or two from overseas colleagues, particularly about delivering excellent care with constrained resources.

We want to establish an annual prize for the highest impact implementation of an idea explicitly created by someone else. We want to take the shame out of stealing from others, shake off the conceit of Not Invented Here, and embrace the sincerest form of flattery by learning how to imitate approaches known to work. Here are just a couple of examples:

Insight Center Innovating for Value in Health Care Sponsored by Medtronic A collaboration of the editors of Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine, exploring best practices for improving patient outcomes while reducing costs.

In 2013, a multidisciplinary team from Contra Costa Regional Medical Center (CCRMC) visited the Thedacare health system. Inspired by their systems for making organizational performance transparent, Contra Costa took their idea of a “visibility wall” and created its own. The wall, located in a high-utilization meeting space, exhibits reports of improvement initiatives and their performance, from improving patient wait times and satisfaction to reductions in the rate of sepsis mortality and increases in “lives saved.” The wall plays a crucial role in sharing goals and improvements underway, and inspires productive conversations about our progress and where we need to do better. It is also helping drive a culture of transparency, where sharing performance data is a way of life.

And here is an example that shows how imitation can speed the implementation of an innovation. The University of Utah Health System developed their on-line transparency program with patient comments over four years (2009 to 2013); for the first three years, the comments were only visible to Utah clinicians and staff. In 2013, Utah made the unedited comments available in full to the public. The result has been improved clinical performance across a range of measures. Piedmont Health System in Georgia heard about this innovation in November 2013, decided to go forward in December 2013, and went live in April 2014. Piedmont skipped the “internal transparency” phase that Utah had gone through, and cut right to the full transparency phase, because leadership knew that the program worked.

We know what you’re thinking: health care is too complex, too specialized, too local to pursue such a systematic emphasis on imitation. To that, we say providers are not as different from each other as they think. In fact, we draw great comfort from seeing how similar health care providers everywhere really are. All providers face the same timeless challenge of relieving our patients’ suffering, and we all get great satisfaction when we make a dent in their problems, with efficiency and reliability.

This new Institute would not only encourage imitation among health care providers – it would support appropriating ideas from other industries as well. This concept, too, is hardly new. Health care systems across the country have been using the Toyota production system to improve quality and efficiency for decades now. Others improve by adopting methods from the military and aviation safety, such as checklists.

Businesses outside of health care are well versed in imitation. Procter and Gamble famously focused on connecting and developing. The company has honed its ability to conduct well-organized global searches for new products and solutions, pulling them into their system and then refining them. Similarly, Cisco Systems doesn’t just invest in its own research; it also teams up with partners who have promising products.

Some health systems are imitating this Cisco Systems partnership approach. Rather than creating infrastructure to address non-clinical issues that affect their patients’ health — like access to food, housing and employment — they are partnering with other organizations that have expertise in delivering these types of social-support services. Reaching outside of their traditional boundaries allows them to tap all the innovative approaches without investing in their own research and development.

We know that, in actuality, innovation and imitation are closely intertwined. We are all for creativity – particularly when it comes to encouraging front-line caregivers to come up with ways to improve patient care. But this creativity should be combined with thoughtful imitation that leverages the benefits of being a “fast follower.” Let’s look to the health systems that are outperforming their peers and imitate them. Let’s lower risk and investment in the unknown or unproven.

Let’s lionize the imitator. It’s the faster way to get better.