Product Description

The U.S. health care system is in crisis. At stake are the quality of care for millions of Americans and the financial well-being of individuals and employers squeezed by skyrocketing costs--not to mention the stability of state and federal government budgets.

In Redefining Health Care, internationally renowned strategy expert Michael E. Porter and innovation expert Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg reveal the underlying and largely overlooked causes of the problem and provide a powerful prescription for change. The authors argue that participants in the health care system have competed to shift costs, accumulate bargaining power, and restrict services rather than create value for patients. This zero-sum competition takes place at the wrong level--among health plans, networks, and hospitals--rather than where it matters most: in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of specific health conditions.

In spite of competition among these systems, the patient care cycle is poorly coordinated. The fractured system undermines both efficiency and quality of outcomes.

Redefining Health Care lays out a breakthrough framework for redefining health care competition based on patient value over the full cycle of care—from prevention and diagnosis through recovery or long-term disease management. With specific recommendations for hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, and policy makers, this book shows how to move to value-based competition on results that will unleash stunning improvements in quality and efficiency.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9863 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 506 pages

About the Author
Michael E. Porter is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School and the author of sixteen books and numerous articles on competition and strategy. Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg is an associate professor at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business and author of over fifty articles and cases on strategy and innovation.

Customer Reviews

How to create cost-effective benefits for everyone's health and health care

Those who have read Porter's previously published On Competition no doubt recall the excellent material on which he and Teisberg collaborated in Chapter 12, "Making Competition in Health Care Work," originally published in Harvard Business Review (July/August 1994). They collaborate again on this volume in which they examine health care issues in three broad areas: "The first is the cost of and access to health insurance. The second is standards for coverage, or the types of care that should be covered by insurance versus being the responsibility of the individual. The third is the structure of health care delivery itself." Porter and Teisberg explain why the only way to truly reform health care is to reform the nature of competition itself. More specifically, to transform health care by realigning competition with value for patients."How to do so is the central focus of this book."

How to explain dysfunctional competition in health care? Porter and Teisberg suggest several which include "misaligned incentives and a series if understandable but unfortunate strategic, organizational, and regulatory choices by each participant in the system that feed on and exacerbate each other. All actors in the system share responsibility for the problem....The problem is that competition does not take place at the medical condition level, nor over the full care cycle. Competition is the current system is at the same time too broad, too narrow, and too local."

This year in the United States alone, at least $2 trillion will be spent on health care, and costs will continue to escalate. While conducting their research, Porter and Teisberg concluded that there should be no presumption that good quality of health care is more costly. On the contrary, they learned that "better providers are usually more efficient. Good quality is less costly because of more accurate diagnoses, fewer treatment errors, lower complication rates, faster recovery, less invasive treatment, and the minimization of the need for treatment. More broadly, better health is less expensive than illness. Better providers can often earn higher margins at the same or lower prices...so quality improvement does not require ever-escalating costs."

Porter and Teisberg have a convincing, indeed compelling argument in support of value-based competition on results in health care within a system which is "ripe for change"...and change for the better but not for the costlier if competition in health care is redefined and then conducted as Porter and Teisberg advocate. One of the most important benefits would be that the changes they propose would be self-reinforcing. "Changes by health plans and providers to compete on values will reinforce and magnify each other, and will spur innovation by suppliers. As consumers and employers adopt these principles, providers and health plans will be more motivated, and more able, to improve the value they deliver."

For these and other reasons, it is imperative to redefine health care by redefining the nature of health care competition. The alternatives and, especially, the implications and consequences of those alternatives are unacceptable. As noted earlier, "How to do so is the central focus of this book."