Michael Porter and Clay Christensen, two Harvard business school professors (via video link) meet 3 CEOs of Health Care businesses/foundations in dialogue at the Fresh Thinking: Innovation conference.
Clay Christensen, Professor, Harvard; Michael Porter, Professor, Harvard; George Halvorson, CEO, Kaiser Permanente; Mark Smith, CEO, California HealthCare Foundation; and Andrew Thompson, Co-founder and CEO of Proteus Biomedical.
Here are the highlights from the Harvard professor intros:
Porter:
- Health care isn’t a “sound byte” subject (the challenges of a confined time session) and there is no silver bullet; the existing US system is a legacy of a much simpler world.
- A fundamental restructuring is required to transform delivery and to change the general mindset.
- Need to increase the value and quality — and there needs to be a better approach than cost-cutting.
- Rewarding the right things is essential — and right now our biggest problem is that we can’t measure well.
- We measure processes — and we need to learn how to measure actual outcomes.
Christensen:
- Two situations: 1. measure value, capture and set price — this is market enabling or 2. value is hard to measure and is realized on other budgets — so no market enabling.
- Administration needs to be integrated — he mentioned that in the Canadian system administration is fragmented.
There was agreement that innovations in health care were happening from the bottom-up. The system is starting to collaborate and have affiliated partnerships. But there is a need for creating an incentive for a whole system of care. Not enough value given to diagnostics. Need to manage care throughout various types of care — chronic and acute. Need multi-disciplinary integrated units.
This reminds me of the visionary and practical Dr. John Gilbert — our Canadian champion of inter-professional health education and practice — former Principal of the UBC College of Health Disciplines and now sharing his expertise around the globe — follow him on twitter at @johnhvg.
One of the panelists came out with an interesting turn of phrase — business model malpractice — there is no investment in thinking through new business models in the health sector. Which points to the importance of the new initiatives at the Sauder Business School around health care — an Executive MBA in Health Care Management and the Centre for Health Care Management: http://chcm.ubc.ca/
Porter’s last word was to circle back to his first message: the most important single action is for us to measure outcomes.