Wednesday, February 19, 2014

End of the Healthcare Cold War?

I was in the US military and defense industry for 15 years, including the end of the Cold War. It took the military-industrial complex 20 years to grasp that end and change significantly to address the new world of dispersed, limited, and intervention-based warfare.  I'm seeing the exact same pattern in healthcare reform. 

We've reached the end of the healthcare Cold War... everybody knows it... but the healthcare-industrial complex keeps wringing its hands, talking about change, but actually changing very little. 

Is it going to take 20 years and a generational turnover of corporate, government, and healthcare leadership to finally turn the corner?  Will we still be fighting the Healthcare Cold War in 2024?  2034? 

1 comment:

john kenagy said...

The Healthcare Industrial complex is a great insight. They sell what we want to buy, not what we need. We in healthcare are just stuck with an antiquated management system that cannot keep up with the velocity of the opportunities to improve. Hence we try harder at what hasn't worked because we can see no other alternative.

It does not have to be a generational change - if you get close to the point of care, it's obvious what we need and that shows the way.

How to deliver: Increase the velocity of adaptation for the benefit of the patient; tap into the knowledge and creativity of everyone in healthcare to do so and then deliver "meaningful analytics to management so they can stop fixing and start accelerating improvement.

Then, healthcare can pull and industry can follow instead of trying to invent a fix. that's a great opportunity

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