Richard Eskow has an interesting article on a post-mortem of Santa Barbara’s RHIO (full report here) done by the California Health Care Foundation.
The authors list many issues for the failure of the experiment: lack of a compelling business case, distorted economic incentives, passive leadership among participants, vendor limitations, software delays, and privacy and security issues as factors that played a significant role in the project’s eventual closure
Overall, it appears the lack of a compelling business case undermined the whole attempt– as participants could not rally around any one defining approach or benefit that would sustainably change any aspect of the business by creating benefits or addressing motivations of specific parties.
This is a key reminder emerging from this failed experiment– that innovation happens because it helps one party compete better. This is why innovation occurs at the fringes, rather than for the masses. Change is hard, and unless someone benefits enough to grow and change the way the marketplace works, nothing is going to happen.
