Consumer Focused Health

We are entering an unprecedented season of change for the United States health care system. Americans are united by their desire to fundamentally reform our current system into one that delivers on the promise of freedom, equity, and best outcomes for best value. In this season of reform, we will see all kinds of ideas presented from all across the political spectrum. Many of these ideas will be prescriptive, and don’t harness the power of innovation to create the dramatic breakthroughs required to create a next generation health system.

We believe there is a better way.

This belief is founded in the idea that aligned incentives can be a powerful way to spur innovation and seek breakthrough ideas from the most unlikely sources. Many of the reform ideas being put forward may not include some of the best thinking, the collective experience, and the most meaningful ways to truly implement change. To address this issue, the X PRIZE Foundation, along with WellPoint Inc and WellPoint Foundation as sponsor, has introduced a $10MM prize for health care innovators to implement a new model of health. The focus of the prize is to increase health care value by 50% in a 10,000 person community over a three year period.

The Healthcare X PRIZE team has released an Initial Prize Design and is actively seeking public comment. We are hoping, and encouraging everyone at every opportunity, to engage in this effort to help design a system of care that can produce dramatic breakthroughs at both an individual vitality and community health level.

Here is your opportunity to contribute: continue reading »

As I’ve been working on the creation of a Healthcare X PRIZE to generate a sustainable systemic change, one core element of the answer has become increasingly clear:

You must reward the innovators in order to see those changes scale and continue to improve.

In the debates on health reform, you can’t just look from the macro perspective and say waste exists and should be eliminated. No one will voluntarily take a pay cut, and all of that waste is someone’s pay.

Instead, we must reward those that do a better job; the companies that we want to grow because they offer us higher quality, better prices, or both. Those companies need to benefit by being able to grow market share, selling products at an attractive margin, or both.

As we evaluate the various health reform proposals out there, the question that should be asked is: how are we setting this up so the person who’s solution best meets the described goals can increase their profits and scale their solution?

Unfortunately, most of the reform proposals out there focus on unilaterally cutting reimbursement (without giving increased profits to those that deliver better results) and distorting the market through mandates. Neither will put in place the sustainable incentives needed to drive increased efficiency over time.

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The world in general has shifted as the internet and accompanying data transparency has made communication and coordination easier across boundaries.

The view that a single entity is required to execute a given task is no longer a given in a world where smaller companies can use outsourced services to appear much larger and large companies outsource everything to smaller companies.

Take for example, Dell. Dell has become primarily an aggregator which allows customers to customize their computer primarily by giving them access to all the options in the supply chain through an easy-to-understand user interface and through the experience of running all communications through that one company’s brand.

Who are the aggregators in health care that help us similarly understand our choices and make appropriate selections? That entity does not exist today in the consumer world…it has been filled by payors in the employer world.

As we move to a world that increasingly must organize around the individual, who will be the aggregators that make health easy to understand for the consumer and allow them to make the best decisions for themselves?

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