Thursday, May 8, 2014

Insourcing Health Care Innovation

Many health care professionals find it irritating when management gurus recommend solving health care's problems with approaches they would “copy and paste” from unrelated industries — a former chief executive of a manufacturing company claims that the same simple lessons that enabled him to transform his own industry can improve value in health care, or a business-school professor offers an eight-point leadership plan that she's translated into health care as easily as if she'd translated it into French. Many people who work in health care value outside perspectives and are open to new approaches — and yet bristle at facile recommendations emerging from these translations.

At the same time, health care improvements can come from people who don't know the field asking, genuinely, “Couldn't you do it a different way?” — where insiders might be less able to imagine alternatives. Principles guiding high-impact innovation are evolving faster outside health care than inside. So it makes sense not to give up on the management gurus entirely, but we can distinguish between those who follow good innovation practices and those who don't. Health care is not a single problem but thousands of problems, and rather than seeking a solution derived from other fields, we'd do better to find a solution process to use from within.

Link to full article here

Originally published in NEJM.

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