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Google-izing Health Care

According to McKinsey estimates, the United States spends "about $650 billion more than might be expected given its level of wealth and the experience of similar countries." Spending on outpatient care accounts for two-thirds of that excess. Simply, Americans spend too much and receive far too little value in return.

Time for disruptive innovation in health care? In a word, yes!
"Using innovation management models previously applied to other industries, Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, argues in “The Innovator’s Prescription” that the concepts behind “disruptive innovation” can reinvent health care. The term “disruptive innovation,” which he introduced in 2003, refers to an unexpected new offering that through price or quality improvements turns a market on its head.

"Disruptive innovators in health care aim to shape a new system that provides a continuum of care focused on each individual patient’s needs, instead of focusing on crises. Mr. Christensen and his co-authors argue that by putting the financial interests of hospitals and doctors at the center, the current system gives routine illnesses with proven therapies the same intensive and costly specialized care that more complicated cases require.

“'Health care hasn’t become affordable,” he said in an interview, “because it hasn’t yet gone through disruptive decentralization.”'
Maybe health care strategists should learn a new acronym: WWGD? What Would Google Do? Can Google's approach transform health care? A radical and near-sacrilegious question, one that health care strategists need an entirely new skill set and vocabulary to answer. Co-creation. Transparency. Openness. Loving a brand because it's MINE and I helped shape it!

With the exception, perhaps, of organized religion, our connection with our own personal health and those who help us preserve it is the most deeply intimate and spiritual bond we will ever form with an "industry." So why is the process of crafting strategy for that deeply intimate and spiritual endeavour so stupifyingly generic?


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