|
"For most employers the health of their employees is looked upon as a cost rather than an opportunity to improve productivity. As leaders of all businesses become more knowledgeable about healthcare issues, they in turn can increase their effectiveness in efforts to improve the long-term health of their employees."
William W. George Professor of Management Practice
|
Recent Publications
Harvard Business School faculty members have published numerous books and articles on the state of healthcare and innovations in the industry.
Book Releases
Selected Articles and Papers
- Care Platforms: A Basic Building Block For Care Delivery
Richard M.J. Bohmer and David M. Lawrence
Health Affairs
Without significant operational reform within the nation's health care delivery organizations, new financing models, payment systems, or structures are unlikely to realize their promise. Adapting insights from high-performing companies in other high-risk, high-cost, science- and technology-based industries, we propose the "care platform" as an organizing framework for internal operations in diversified provider organizations to increase the quality, reliability, and efficiency of care delivery. A care platform organizes "care production" around similar work, rather than organs or specialties; integrates standard and custom care processes; and surrounds them with specifically configured information and business systems. Such organizational designs imply new roles for physicians.
- Disruptive Innovation In Health Care Delivery: A Framework For Business-Model Innovation
Jason Hwang and Clayton M. Christensen
Health Affairs
Disruptive innovation has brought affordability and convenience to customers in a variety of industries. However, health care remains expensive and inaccessible to many because of the lack of business-model innovation. This paper explains the theory of disruptive innovation and describes how disruptive technologies must be matched with innovative business models. The authors present a framework for categorizing and developing business models in health care, followed by a discussion of some of the reasons why disruptive innovation in health care delivery has been slow.
- The Rise of In-Store Clinics - Threat or Opportunity?
Richard Bohmer
New England Journal of Medicine
[Extract] The recent acquisition by the pharmacy chain CVS of MinuteClinic, a chain of in-store clinics founded in Minnesota, has put this model of primary care delivery back in the spotlight. Although still not widespread, the model is increasing in prevalence and appeals to several stakeholders: payers note that primary care is less expensive when delivered at in-store clinics than when provided in a doctor's office or emergency room, patients value the convenience and low price, entrepreneurs see a profitable business model, and proponents of consumer-driven health care see services that can be paid for out of health… [Click here for full text.]
- How Physicians Can Change the Future of Health Care
Michael Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg
The Journal of the American Medical Association
Today's preoccupation with cost shifting and cost reduction undermines physicians and patients. Instead, health care reform must focus on improving health and health care value for patients. We propose a strategy for reform that is market based but physician led. Physician leadership is essential. Improving the value of health care is something only medical teams can do. The right kind of competition-competition to improve results-will drive dramatic improvement. With such positive-sum competition, patients will receive better care, physicians will be rewarded for excellence, and costs will be contained. Physicians can lead this change and return the practice of medicine to its appropriate focus: enabling health and effective care. Three principles should guide this change: (1) the goal
is value for patients, (2) medical practice should be organized around medical conditions and care cycles, and (3) results-risk-adjusted outcomes and costs-must be measured. Following these principles, professional satisfaction will increase and current pressures on physicians will decrease. If physicians fail to lead these changes, they will inevitably face ever-increasing administrative control of medicine. Improving health and health care value for patients is the only real solution. Value-based competition on results provides a path for reform that recognizes the role of health professionals at the heart of the system.
- Can Science be a Business?
Gary Pisano
Harvard Business Review
In 1976, Genentech, the first biotechnology company, was founded by a young venture capitalist and a university professor to exploit recombinant DNA technology. Thirty years and more than $300 billion in investments later, only a handful of biotech firms have matched Genentech's success or even shown a profit. No avalanche of new drugs has hit the market, and the long-awaited breakthrough in R&D productivity has yet to materialize. This disappointing performance raises a question: Can organizations motivated by the need to make profits and please shareholders successfully conduct basic scientific research as a core activity? The question has largely been ignored, despite intense debate over whether business's invasion of basic science--long the domain of universities and nonprofit
research institutions--is limiting access to discoveries, thereby slowing advances in science. Biotech has not lived up to its promise, says the author, because its anatomy, which has worked well in other high-tech sectors, can't handle the fundamental challenges facing drug R&D: profound, persistent uncertainty and high risks rooted in the limited knowledge of human biology; the need for the diverse disciplines involved in drug discovery to work together in an integrated fashion; and barriers to learning, including tacit knowledge and murky intellectual property rights, which can slow the pace of scientific advance. A more suitable anatomy would include increased vertical integration; a smaller number of closer, longer collaborations; an emphasis by universities on sharing rather
than patenting scientific discoveries; more cross-disciplinary academic research; and more federal and private funding for translational research, which bridges basic and applied science. With such modifications, science can be a business.
- When Do Scientists Become Entrepreneurs? The Social Structural Antecedents of Commercial Activity in the Academic Life Sciences
Toby E. Stuart, and Waverly W. Ding
American Journal of Sociology
The authors examine the conditions prompting university-employed life scientists to become entrepreneurs, defined to occur when a scientist (1) founds a biotechnology company, or (2) joins the scientific advisory board of a new biotechnology firm. This study draws on theories of social influence, socialization, and status dynamics to examine how proximity to colleagues in commercial science influences individuals' propensity to transition to entrepreneurship. To expose the mechanisms at work, this study also assesses how proximity effects change over time as for-profit science diffuses through the academy. Using adjusted proportional hazards models to analyze case-cohort data, the authors find evidence that the orientation toward commercial science of individuals' colleagues and
coauthors, as well as a number of other workplace attributes, significantly influences scientists' hazards of transitioning to for-profit science.
- Health Services for the Poor in Developing Countries: Private vs. Public vs. Private & Public
Tarun Khanna and David M. Bloom
In Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and Economic Value. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.
In much of the developing world, poor health is a major impediment to both quality of life and economic development. The poor are particularly vulnerable to the economic impacts of ill health, as they lack the savings to pay for prevention and treatment, and often rely on their own physical labor for their livelihoods. As a result, long-term illnesses strip families of income and assets. At the same time, the public health systems of most developing countries tend to focus their modest resources on treatment rather than prevention, and often give higher priority to diseases that afflict the wealthy rather than the poor. This paper discusses ways of addressing these obstacles and meeting the need for healthcare in developing countries. It looks at different types of health interventions
and the different actors (government, for-profit companies and non-profits) involved and then discusses three major health problems-heart disease, HIV/AIDS, and childhood illnesses-to show the different levels of private sector involvement in health. We focus in particular on partnerships between public and private sector organizations and on how such partnerships can be most effective.
|
|
