Press / Media
by Amy Bernstein, strategy+business, Summer 2007
A leading student of the biotech business describes the problems holding the industry back, and how it can overcome them.
By Rebecca Knight, Financial Times, May 11 2007
Robert Huckman has spent a good portion of his career working to improve medical care in the US. As a consultant in the private sector, he advised healthcare companies on their merger and acquisition strategies. And as an academic, he has done groundbreaking work on the efficacy of surgeons and surgical teams.
"There's a lot we can do in terms of thinking about improving medical care that doesn't have to do with adding technology," says Prof Huckman. "We can organise existing practices more efficiently and more productively."
Huckman's most important finding – about the importance of teamwork in the operating room – came in a paper he wrote with a Harvard colleague, Gary Pisano.
The two professors analysed the work of heart surgeons in Pennsylvania who practice at more than one hospital. They found that the death rates from comparable procedures performed by the same surgeon can differ as much as fivefold at different hospitals. The majority of the time, patients did better in the hospital where their surgeon performed more operations.
He says the results indicate that the surgeon's interactions with his or her team of nurses, profusionists, anaesthetists and technicians are critical to the outcome of the surgery.
by Stephen Heuser, Boston Globe, May 6, 2007
Biotechnology proponents rarely talk about the fact that the industry loses huge quantities of money. According to a new report from accountants Ernst & Young, the public biotechnology companies in New England collectively lost $1.3 billion in 2006, the highest loss of any region in the country.
Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano, author of the recent book ‘‘Science Business: The Promise, the Reality, and the Future of Biotech,’’ set out to answer a question that had long intrigued him: How could an industry invented and staffed by brilliant, capable people have such a dismal long-term financial record? And why do investors keeping throwing money into the ring? Pisano spoke to Globe biotechnology reporter Stephen Heuser.
