Clay Christensen: How to Bring Disruptive Innovation to Health Care

[CC-Conrad Clyburn-MedForeSight]

Colleagues,

As reported in Harvard Business Review ... According to Clay Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail ... Disruptive innovation seems to have bypassed the health care industry...

...Clay Christensen’s theory predicts that entrenched companies, products and services are often “disrupted” from below by competitors who are able to meet the needs of most current customers with products that do less (but just enough) and are much, much cheaper...

... Writing in the new issue of Harvard Business Review, Christensen and colleagues Richard Bohmer and John Kenagy paint the portrait of an industry with such inbred systemic interests that it has slowed (but not erased, thank goodness) the inevitable march of disruptive innovation...

ENJOY!

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... Here is their prescription for unleashing disruption on the health care fortress.

1. Create—then embrace—a system where the clinician’s skill level is matched to the difficulty of the medical problem ... “Rather than fight the nurse practitioners who are invading their turf, primary care physicians should move upmarket themselves, using advances in diagnostic and therapeutic technologies to perform many of the services they now refer to costly hospitals and specialists.
2. Invest less money in high-end, complex technologies and more in technologies that simplify complex problems ... "great growth opportunities exist in the simpler tiers of the market ... Rather than focus on complex solutions for complex problems, research and development need to focus on simplification".
   
3. Create new organizations to do the disrupting. “The health care industry today is trying to preserve outmoded institutions ... the history of disruptive innovations tells us that those institutions will be replaced, soon enough" ...
4. Overcome the inertia of regulation. Instead of working to preserve the existing system, regulators need to frame their jobs differently.

Read on at: http://hbr.org/web/extras/insight-center/health-care/will-disruptiv...

[Thomas M. Loarie]

Conrad,
Suggest you add the following videos as well. Innovator's Prescription by Clay's co-author Jason Hwang, MD, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfMqU7P1sdg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVJRdeu_LeM

[CC-Conrad Clyburn-MedForeSight]

Thomas,

Thank you.

I have added "The Innovator's Prescription" to the "MedTech-IQ" Recommended Reading Center ... on the homepage.

You may also find this clip interesting from our videolibrary ... "The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis", http://medtechiq.ning.com/video/strategy-clayton-christensen

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[Thomas M. Loarie]

Clay's 2008 book, "The Innovator's Prescription," is a great follow-up to the HBR article. This is a must read for anyone working in the Healthcare system.