Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Innovation Opportunity to Fix Our Broken Medical Structure

There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal (I think it was Saturday, September 23) about a private health insurance company and the reason for its success. The leader of the organization believes that lack of continuity it one of the prime issues with healthcare today. He is fairly convincing that the reason we have lost so much continuity is because market has changed, but the healthcare industry hasn't responded appropriately.

He points out that there are specialized doctors, and there are specialist in the specialty, and so on.  There are so many different specialty doctors, but no good communication system set up for collaboration between the doctors. This insurance company puts a team of healthcare professions together to ensure the patient gets the appropriate and most expeditious treatment. 50 years ago, there weren't near as many specialized doctors as there are today.

The leader of the company also said that years ago, a person worked for one company all their life. This may have afforded the employee the opportunity to keep the same healthcare professionals to care for them, building extensive history with the caregiver. Nowadays, a person may work for more than 3 or 4 employers and when they switch they may have to find new doctors and start over.

I wish I hadn't thrown the paper away....I meant to keep it for reference. I hope that you get the gist of it and agree that this may be a situation where the market changed and the industry has not responded, leaving terrific opportunity for innovation.

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