Healthcare stakeholders should welcome disruption as an opportunity to advance the industry, a Harvard Business School professor told conference attendees on Friday, the final day of AHIP Institute 2008.
Clayton Christensen, who also authored The Innovator's Dilemma, said that technology is the disruptive innovation that can help fix the broken healthcare system.
The general hospital has overshot the amount of care and cost people can use and afford, respectively, he said.
The solution needs to be "simple and cheap," he said. "Don't expect expensive leadership to get cheaper."
He recommended bringing technology to physicians' offices and also to patients' home. Technology, which should be brought to the general practitioners in an incremental manner, will enable them to perform services that specialists currently do.
Likewise, through the adoption of technology, nurse practitioners can perform services that physicians do now.
The idea, according to Christensen, is to make healthcare affordable for those who cannot pay for healthcare services.
Three specific technologies will bring about improved ability to diagnose precisely and enable disruption in healthcare business models, he said: molecular diagnostics to understand genetic structure, imaging technologies to look inside the body and high-bandwidth telecommunications to bring expertise to offices with limited healthcare resources.
The hospital's value proposition that it will do everything for everybody is not a viable business model and is unheard of in any other industry, he said. Resources and processes should help shape an institution's profit formula, which will then determine its value proposition.
Hospitals should become focused solution shops specializing in such diseases as cancer, while some hospitals and clinics should provide the procedures after definitive diagnoses have been made, he said.
Finally, facilitated networks should take the lead in caring for chronic diseases, he said.
If Christensen's views are borne out, integrated caregivers, such as Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs and Henry Ford, will have a significant advantage over other stakeholders, he said.