The Collaborative Forum

I read an interesting article on Sunday, in The New York Times Magazine, Making Healthcare Better. The article discusses Dr. Brent James of Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare and the results that he and his team are producing with their patients. The Intermountain team has been improving healthcare and reducing costs by following treatment protocols and estimates indicate that the data-driven changes they’ve made at Intermountain have saved thousands of lives a year. In total, Intermountain has developed protocols for 50 clinical conditions, which accounts for more than half of their patients.
 
There are plenty in the medical field who are skeptical of Dr. James and his approach—and the balanced article includes them—but the results speak for themselves. In the end, what Dr. James and his team at Intermountain have done, is take a different approach to practicing medicine. They’ve looked at the way things were done, and effectively disrupted the intuitive approach to medicine. By providing protocols as a guideline, their doctors have saved thousands of lives.
 
Disruptive innovation—a theory of Clayton Christensen—discusses that the way to affect real change, is to disrupt the way things have been done. Disruptive innovation can have characteristics that traditional segments may not want (protocols vs. intuitive medicine). In fact, I founded Pharos Innovations and developed Tel-Assurance® based on Christensen’s notion of disruptive innovation. Read the rest of this entry →

A couple of weeks ago I was in Boston to attend the 2009 Connected Health Symposium. Despite the restrictions on folks travel budgets, attendance was larger than last year, with more than 1000 healthcare industry attendees, and much of the conversation—unsurprisingly—was about the uncertainty regarding upcoming healthcare reform.

But while healthcare reform provided a common thread of uncertainty, there were two major themes that surfaced, on which almost everyone agreed. Those themes continued to come up in both the presentations I attended, as well as my hallway conversations:

1. It’s all about patient engagement
2. Simplicity is the key to success

Clearly, these two themes have been part of the Pharos Innovations approach and business model from the beginning. I found it gratifying that others in our industry, including payers and industry thought leaders concurred. Read the rest of this entry →