Course Welcome and Information

Course Welcome and Information > Course Welcome and Information > Video: Introduction to Innovating in Health Care

• I’m a professor at the Harvard Business School and I’ve been teaching a course on how to innovate in health care for about 30 years.
• Many of them have innovated health care, but there’s still so much opportunity.
• Health care has negative labor productivity.
• So when you go to the store and you buy a yogurt, you take this little package of yogurt and you know so much about the yogurt.
• Do you know the price of anything in the health care? Very much doubt it.
• How about when you go to your doctor? How about if you’re really sick and you need a mastectomy or if you’re a guy and you need a prostatectomy? What do you know? You don’t know anything.
• Isn’t it ironic? I know everything I want to know about a trivial purchase like my yogurt, but when it comes to my health care, I don’t know anything.
• So even in the United States, the richest country in the world, currently, as I speak, out of our 330 million people, we have 50 million people who don’t have health insurance.
• Even if our health care reform law kicks in, we’ll still have 20 million people without health insurance.
• So why are they such great savers? They don’t have health insurance.
• Many developing countries have virtually no health insurance.
• Even countries that allegedly have health insurance don’t really have health insurance.
• So if you’re in the UK, everybody has health insurance.
• Does everybody have equal access to care? No. If you’re poor, if you’re not assertive, if you don’t look like you’re going to sue, if you’re not connected, if your uncle or your aunt isn’t a doctor or a nurse, you go to the back of the line.
• Virtually every developed country in the world, as the GDP grows like this, the cost of health care grows like that.
• Even with countries that have health insurance for everybody, doesn’t really mean everybody.
• It means if you look like you’re going to sue, if you know somebody in the health care system, you get different kind of treatment from people who don’t know.
• Opportunities to standardize and measure the quality of health care.
• Then once we’ve determined whether an innovation is likely to succeed, we’re going to look at the elements of the business model that may give it a really viable business.
• I mean any kind of entrepreneurial venture, whether it’s for profit, nonprofit, governmental, we’re going to say, does this thing have legs? We’re going to separate the wheat from the chaff.
• If you hang in there with me, and more power to you if you do, we’re going to go through a number of case studies of different kinds of entrepreneurial health care ventures.
• We’re going to keep applying this framework, this analytic framework, can we tell the winners from the losers? And from the winners, what are the key elements that need to be there in order to make them successful? So we’re going to study this with these different case studies.
• Then we have videos of these CEOs of these companies, these people who are the key movers and shakers, and we’ve interviewed them.
• You’re going to learn how they got to where they got.
• So every case study says, what should here or she do? What should this entrepreneur do? We’re going to explore what we think they should do and they’re going to tell us what they actually did.