How To Cure Health Care

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care

Competency: self-development

Who benefits: primarily those living in the United States

Consultant Usage: depending on your client may be useful background material

What’s it about? The October issue of Harvard Business Review has a number of important articles that would be of interest to the profile of our (exceptionally above) average reader of this Blog. One of the really exciting articles is on a re-do of the currently screwed up US health system. (Almost everyone agrees that the US health system doesn’t work very well – the political debate is on how to fix it.)

Enter distinguished Harvard Business Professor Michael E. Porter and equally distinguished doctor and chief medical officer Thomas H. Lee at Press Ganey (an advanced thinking health care consulting firm). They leave no stone unturned, no rock unthrown in advocating a new way of doing health care and health care business.

I have written several posts lately about disruption in education (enter free on-line universities) and business in general (conscious capitalism). Well consider health care now officially added to that list.

The article begins with a rigorous denunciation of health care as currently practiced in both medical and business terms. The authors shout that the time for business-as-usual is over. Medical business-as-usual is dead. Long live the new medical paradigm!

What I like most about the introduction to this lengthy article is how easily the new medical model slides into the concept of the conscious capitalism. Here is a quote from the home page of the Press Ganey website: “To improve the patient experience, health care providers must first be able to see and understand the complex relationships between satisfaction, clinical, safety and financial measures.”

What they go on to describe isn’t a complete conscious capitalist model, but it is not hard to see that is their ideas are fully implemented, they may achieve much of what the new business paradigm is proposing.

For starters they advocate a fundamentally new strategy that maximizes value for the patient (customer). They want to measure success in terms of patient outcomes achieved.

Here is a brief summary of what you can read in detail within the article: “The strategy for moving to a high-value health care delivery system comprises six interdependent components: organizing around patients’ medical conditions rather than physicians’ medical specialties, measuring costs and outcomes for each patient, developing bundled prices for the full care cycle, integrating care across separate facilities, expanding geographic reach, and building an enabling IT platform.”

I hope that summary entices you to read the full article. As concerned citizens we need better information about real (not spin) health care issues and what can be done to improve our health care systems. This article is a good introduction to our education and the possibilities for the future.

If you desire more information on the need to sweep away the current business model(s), you can go to Michael Porter’s 2006 book Redefining Health Care as a detailed precursor to this article. If you do read the book, notice how far the author has come from his position 7 years ago. Back then he wanted to fix a broken system. Today he want a whole new system.

And if you still want more, go to the Harvard Insight Center/The New England Journal of Medicine’s Leading Health Care Innovation website for some other excellent articles on where health care needs to reform/improve/reorganize/develop/change.

Catch you later.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.