The Attacker's Advantage: Turning Uncertainty into Breakthrough Opportunities by Ram Charan

Author:Ram Charan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781610394758
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2015-02-24T07:00:00+00:00

AS WE HAVE SEEN, your mind-set is not a given. It can change, opening the mental pathways to see opportunities in uncertainty. The next chapter describes how George Halvorson, as CEO of Kaiser Permanente (he has since retired), did just that, going on the offense despite the tremendous uncertainty in health care.

CHAPTER 11

Kaiser Permanente’s Path Through the Turmoil in Health Care

YOU DIDN’T HAVE to be a genius in the early 2000s to sense that health care was going to change, but how dramatically, in what ways, and what the implications were for various participants was as opaque as a brick. The entire industry—a mix of very large players such as hospital chains and insurance companies (as large as $80 billion in revenue) and small players like individual doctors—was operating as a cottage industry. Each entity tackled certain aspects of health care in isolation from the others. A focus on the total end-to-end experience of the consumer, in this case the patient, was conspicuously missing. The industry was data poor: medical records were kept on paper in separate physical locations, so while patients passed from one care entity to another, information about them did not. That made it impossible to identify opportunities for improvement based on data from various parts of the health-care chain. Health-care costs were steadily rising, a huge problem. People inside and outside of the industry, including members of Congress, began talking about health-care rationing, distasteful as it was, as perhaps the only viable end game for care delivery.

That was the situation in 2002, the year George Halvorson became CEO of Kaiser Permanente, the California-based health insurance company that also ran clinics and community hospitals. He saw things differently. While many of his industry peers seemed resigned to a future of rationing and hoped mainly to postpone it, he saw an option. Why not reengineer health care—that is, use information technology to integrate the information and use it to find ways to improve the cost and quality of outcomes for care delivery? Despite the fact that US health care was and is in seemingly permanent flux, Halvorson went on the offense. In so doing he created clarity for his own company and, by sharing his thinking and helping shape government policy, for many other players as well.

Rationing didn’t make sense to him, first because it conjured up a dour future that didn’t match the idealistic mission of health-care providers, and second because he had seen the benefits of linking clinics and hospitals in his former post as head of Health Partners, a $2 billion health plan and delivery system in Minnesota. “Rationing would be a lousy world to be in, for our business and for our patients,” Halvorson explains. “I knew there were better answers, because I had had the good fortune of running a model where we owned clinics and hospitals, and we could track things using information that crossed those organizational boundaries. For example, we could focus on our patients with diabetes and co-morbidities and significantly

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.