Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: Social Innovation initiatives are increasingly adopted by healthcare education organizations to enhance patient well-being, strengthen community relations, and support competency development among health professionals in training. Yet limited evidence exists on how such initiatives generate value within for-profit medical schools operating under hybrid social-commercial logics. This study presents an evaluation protocol for Afya’s Clown Therapy Project, a humor-based therapeutic intervention implemented in a Brazilian public hospital. The objective is to develop a framework assessing contributions to patient experience, student learning, and institutional value creation.
METHODS: This ongoing study employs a qualitative, multi-stakeholder design informed by Social Innovation, stakeholder theory, and humanized care frameworks. The protocol comprises four components: (1) Stakeholder Mapping to identify expected outcomes across patients, students, faculty, staff, community members, and corporate representatives; (2) Patient-Centered Impact Assessment using semi-structured interviews and observations to explore emotional, psychosocial, and care-experience effects; (3) Educational Impact Assessment capturing medical students’ development of empathy, communication skills, and professional identity; and (4) Organizational Value Assessment examining implications for community engagement, institutional legitimacy, and ESG strategy. Data collection includes 36+ interviews, field observations, reflective diaries, and document analysis. Triangulation and cross-case coding will ensure validity.
RESULTS: The protocol anticipates identifying measurable dimensions of social, educational, and organizational value, including patient-reported emotional well-being, student empathy indicators, and institutional reputation metrics relevant to value-based medical education.
CONCLUSIONS: This study introduces the first structured framework for analyzing social innovation within a for-profit medical school in Brazil. By integrating qualitative and potential quantitative indicators, it advances ISPOR’s agenda on value-driven healthcare and offers a scalable model for embedding socially oriented interventions into medical training and institutional ESG strategies.