The Innovator’s Prescription
A disruptive solution to healthcare
Clayton M. Christensen, Grossman & Hwang   |  January 22, 2009  

By Reg Nordman

Ten years in the making, this is another very useful analysis by the Christensen team.  I quickly found seven immediate money-making ideas for the tech industry in healthcare in this book.  As ever, the book is clear and well written, with fascinating footnotes in every chapter (almost a book within the book) . The author(s) are no fans of government all-in-one funded (i.e. Canada-style) healthcare - but they have an equal dislike of the present US model.

He echoes one of the results of the Rocket Builders - NRC Healthcare opportunities study - which was that opportunities lie in the interstitials between silos and layers of the US and Canadian systems.  He extends it further by illustrating the fundamental and repairable structural flaws in the present systems.  The disruptive opportunities he shows up are very near, real and often just waiting for the right group to sieze onto them.

As ever, he points out how to start with a less-than-ideal solution for the unserved market - which is easier in the US than Canada where we have a poor but working solution - we then require a dramatically better solution for disruption. He also suggests that a democracy is not the tool to effect change, unless the change is so subtle, few notice.  For every change proposed in a democracy, someone will lose from the status quo, and they have lots of political levers to pull to keep things the same.  He also repeats that it is impossible to effect the change from within - reminding us  that IBM was the only company to survive multiple disruptions, each time through first creating a distinct stand alone division, outside of the corporate culture.

Doctors  will cry out No! when reading the section on commoditization of health care services - but if they look around they will see that it is happening. Using Christensen’s view, hospitals should finally be able to decide what type of business they are in (he identifies three distinct types) and then they will be able to carve out the metrics to help them change to a sustainable model.

A very good book for all of us, expecially if you have any interest in heathcare and healthcare dollars.

Get it here 


Innovator’s Prescription
A disruptive solution to healthcare
Clayton M. Christensen, Grossman & Hwang
2008
ISBN 9780071592086