Robert Huckman is the Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, the Faculty Chair of the HBS Healthcare Initiative, the Chair of the MBA Required Curriculum, and the Unit Head for Technology and Operations Management. He currently teaches the second-year MBA course entitled Transforming Health Care Delivery and has previously taught both required and elective courses in Technology and Operations Management. Professor Huckman is the Faculty Chair of HBS' executive education program entitled Managing Health Care Delivery. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Co-Chair of the management track of Harvard's doctoral program in health policy.
Professor Huckman's research focuses on the linkages between organizational characteristics and operating performance, with an emphasis on the health care industry. He is an associate editor of Management Science and has published articles in journals including the American Economic Review, Harvard Business Review, Health Affairs, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Management Science, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Professor Huckman also serves as a Trustee of the Brigham and Women's Physicians Organization and on the advisory boards of several private companies in the health care industry.
Professor Huckman received a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University and an A.B. in Public Policy, summa cum laude, from Princeton University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Prior to his graduate studies, Professor Huckman was a Principal and Founding Equity Member of Stamos Associates, Inc., a strategy and operations consulting firm serving clients in the health care industry. In 1997, Stamos Associates was acquired by Perot Systems, Inc. Professor Huckman has also worked at Booz Allen & Hamilton, Inc.
Even the most vocal critic of the American health care system cannot watch coverage of the current Covid-19 crisis without appreciating the heroism of each caregiver and patient fighting its most-severe consequences. Hospitals are being built in parks and convention centers, new approaches to sterilizing personal protective equipment (PPE) for reuse are being implemented, and new protocols for placing multiple patients on a single ventilator have been developed. Most dramatically, caregivers have routinely become the only people who can hold the hand of a sick or dying patient since family members are forced to remain separate from their loved ones at their time of greatest need. Amidst the immediacy of this crisis, it is important to begin to consider the less-urgent-but-still-critical question of what the American health care system might look like once the current rush has passed. In particular, what can the system learn from the existential challenges it faces due to the spread of Covid-19? A few broad lessons are already emerging.
While Amazon’s collaboration with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase would obviously leverage the purchasing power of three massive employers and could lead to innovative insurance models, it seems that the bigger opportunity would be in improving how care is delivered to patients. At its root, health care is a service that needs to be delivered to a customer. For existing health care companies, the operative words in that mandate have been “health care”; for Amazon, the operative words likely are “service that needs to be delivered to a customer.”
Our research on the ways health care could apply the experiences of other industries suggests that instead of viewing IT as a transactional tool for billing, monitoring, and error checking, organizations should embrace it as an instrument to help transform the way they deliver medical care. This will entail prioritizing quality improvement over cost cutting, making data collection easier and better, turning the data into actionable information for clinicians, and forging new operating and business models.
While chronic disease management (CDM) apps have had some initial success, they have not yet lived up to their potential. This shortcoming is not due to the technologies, which are quite impressive; the problem is the incentives and institutions of the delivery system into which the technologies are being introduced.
The long-standing argument that focused operations outperform others stands in contrast to claims about the benefits of broader operational scope. Within the literature on corporate strategy, this tension between focus and breadth is reconciled by the concept of related diversification (i.e., a firm with multiple operating units, each specializing in distinct but related activities). We consider whether there are similar benefits to related diversification within an operating unit and examine the mechanism that generates these benefits. Using the empirical context of cardiovascular care within hospitals, we first examine the relationship between a hospital's level of specialization in cardiovascular care and the quality of its clinical performance on cardiovascular patients, finding that, on average, focus has a positive effect on quality performance.
The ongoing fragmentation of work has resulted in a narrowing of tasks into smaller pieces that can be sent outside the organization and, in many instances, around the world. This trend is shifting the boundaries of organizations and leading to increased outsourcing. Though the consolidation of volume may lead to productivity improvement, little is known about how this shift toward outsourcing influences learning by providers of outsourced services. We examine more than 2.7 million cases read by 97 radiologists for 1,431 customers and find evidence supporting the benefits of customer-specific experience accumulated by individual radiologists.
