Welcome to the new HBR.org. Here’s what’s new. Here’s an FAQ.

WHAT TO READ NEXT

The Worth-Your-Time Test

Joy at Work: It's Your Right

Don't Let Your Job Search Depress You

EDUCATION

Bridging Health Care’s Innovation-Education Gapby Regina Herzlinger, Vasant Kumar Ramaswamy, and Kevin A. Schulman

NOVEMBER 11, 2014

INSIGHT CENTER

Innovating for Value in Health CareSPONSORED BY MEDTRONIC

A collaboration of the editors of Harvard Business Review and the New England

Journal of Medicine, exploring best practices for improving patient outcomes

while reducing costs.

RECOMMENDED

Elizabeth Best (B)LEADERSHIP & MANAGINGPEOPLE CASE by C. WickhamSkinner, Ardis Burst

$8.95 ADD TO CART

SAVE SHARE

Steamboat Ski & ResortCorp.TECHNOLOGY & OPERATIONSCASE by Jeffrey F. Rayport, DonBramley, Mary Callahan, HilaryNicholas, Jordan Smyth, KatieKing

$8.95 ADD TO CART

SAVE SHARE

Dilemmas of Innovation:A SummaryINNOVATION &ENTREPRENEURSHIP CHAPTERby Clayton M. Christensen

$8.95 ADD TO CART

SAVE SHARE

Despite the excellence of its delivery, insurance, and technology components, the health care sector in the United States is plagued with sky-high

costs, unequal access, and erratic quality. This predicament continues to create a major drag on the U.S. economy.

According to an analysis by McKinsey, while the productivity of the U.S. computer and semiconductor industry grew by 7.6% per year in the 1990-

2007 period, the productivity of the U.S. health care industry dropped by 0.8% annually. To change this grim statistic, the pace of innovation must

dramatically increase. But to achieve that, we must alter how we educate future health care leaders. Despite the health care sector’s massive share

of America’s GDP, most graduate health care administration and MD/MBA programs have not aligned their curricula to address the need for

innovation.

In our interviews with 58 CEOs in the health care sector about their organizations’ future needs, the words they most used

were change and innovation. (The 58 included leaders of delivery, insurance, med tech, biopharma, and IT organizations and ministers of health.)

They wanted people who can investigate problems, find solutions through process and organizational innovation, and drive them forward — people

who can work on a diverse team, understand failure and its causes, and manage change.

But our analysis of health-care-related curricula at 26 top U.S. schools that offer graduate degrees in health care administration found the most

frequently used words were policy and organization. Innovation and entrepreneur were used only 27 times.

At far too many programs, curricula focus on isolated subjects — such as health policy, analytics, quantitative problem solving — that are taught

primarily through lectures in theoretical settings. Despite the excellence of the individual faculties, programs, and schools, this siloed, abstract

approach does not meet the needs of future innovators. Many CEOs have been so dissatisfied with traditional education for health care

administrators that they have had their organizations develop training programs of their own.

Our surveys indicated that many academics in the field of health care administration agree that schools are not educating students to be able to

create badly needed new processes, systems, and organizational forms and to solve problems and implement solutions across a range of business

processes.

Separate analyses of medical school curricula reached similar conclusions: A Lancet article, for example, called for global change to promote

transformative professional education that harnesses flows of educational content and innovation.

The CEOs we interviewed do not believe that academia alone should

shoulder the burden of fixing this problem. We agree. Business leaders

can and should partner with educators to accelerate this improvement in

pedagogical techniques by pursuing these transformative activities:

Team teaching. The CEOs want to provide input on program design and

teaching, and many would be willing to guest-lecture or co-teach. If a

faculty member lacks the relevant real-world experience, the remedy is to

have him or her team up with an entrepreneur, a strategist, or an innovator to teach and help solve local and global practical problems. In an MBA

course Innovating in Health Care that one of us (Regina) teaches at Harvard Business School (HBS), for example, two health-care-reimbursement

specialists participate in a session to assist students in developing business plans. As a result of one plan (developed by a team of Harvard MBA and

School of Public Health students), a large U.S. health insurance company will reimburse on-demand jet service for kidney transplantation.

Mentoring. Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneur in Residence program is an example of an organized campus activity that brings health care

innovators in contact with students. Entrepreneurs-in-residence serve for the entire academic year in a part-time capacity, meeting with students in

group and one-on-one sessions and collaborating with various faculty members on cases, courses, research, and other activities.

Case studies. Case studies of successes and failures (especially failures) are essential. Business leaders could partner with academics to develop

them and appear in classes when they are taught. (The CEOs of a number of health care companies from around the world lectured in the HBS

course Innovating in Health Care when cases on their organizations were taught. They included Amil, Fortis Healthcare, McKesson, PAREXEL

International, and the Vitality Group.)

Field projects and apprenticeships. The CEOs feel that field work and formal internships can offer lessons the classroom cannot. Formal

residencies, apprenticeships, or field-study courses that place the student in a health care environment will help inform future innovators about the

real-world challenges facing health care systems in the 21 century and the difficulties likely to be encountered in implementing solutions. Five

new health care businesses resulted from the field studies in the 2013 Innovating in Health Care course, including an ambulatory pediatric surgery

center for Medicaid recipients and a hospital in Nigeria.

Rewards and incentives. While traditional classroom, online, and blended courses may remain mainstays of health care education, the future

challenge will be to integrate the classroom into the real world. To achieve this, current faculty incentives, which are often focused primarily on

research and publications, should be strengthened to recognize excellence in teaching and reforming the curriculum.

Accreditation and standards. Accreditation programs for U.S. medical and health administration schools lack specific requirements for core

competencies related to innovation. Similarly, courses for the maintenance of a medical license have no specific emphasis on innovation. Ranking

of educational programs by third parties and other formal and informal governance processes also do not stress innovation. To address these

deficiencies, the business community should collaborate with accreditation, licensure, and ranking programs to create innovation standards. In

addition, it should consider working with schools’ admissions programs to offer student loans and other incentives for students who demonstrate

interest and competence in becoming innovators.

These activities require greater commitment by business — a shift from trying to alleviate the symptoms of an anachronistic educational system

toward a partnership that can help improve global health care systems in a lasting and meaningful way. To encourage this partnership, a group

representing global academic institutions, professional organizations, and health care consultancies formed the Global Educators Network for

Health Care Innovation Education (GENIE) Group.

The goal of the organization, which includes us, is to make innovation a central part of the education of future leaders in health care. To advance it,

we have already held two annual conferences with 150 global academic and stakeholder attendees at Harvard Business School and Duke University,

launched the Harvard edX program Innovating in Health Care and the HBS Executive Education course Business Innovations in Global Health

Care, created an archive of innovative programs, and surveyed a wide range of constituents to help develop the competencies they deemed

necessary in an innovation curriculum.

With activities like these, we aim to encourage business leaders and academics to create health care administration education more focused on

innovation.

st

innovation.

Health-care-administration education is at a crossroads similar to one that business schools were at in the late 1970s, when courses that

emphasized entrepreneurship were almost non-existent. To change this, business schools developed a network of entrepreneurs who partnered

with faculty to guest lecture, develop case studies, and provide intellectual, financial, and moral support. (See Shaping the Waves: A History of

Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School.) Entrepreneurship is now a vital component of almost all business administration programs and has

played an important role in the U.S. economy.

That success demonstrates that academics and business leaders can join forces once again to transform the way that future health care leaders are

educated. By working together to integrate the classroom into the real world, they can help schools produce the innovators that health care

organizations deeply need.

Related Videos and Other Resources: For more information on this topic, watch Professor Herzlinger explain the need for innovation and how to make

it happen in health-care-administration education; hear from some of the leading global health care CEOs and academics who support innovation in

health care; and see some of the innovative ventures in health care started by students. The CEO champions of this movement can be found here. The

academic supporters of this movement are listed on the GENiE website. Finally, this video is the introduction to the MOOC version of Innovating in

Health Care.

Regina Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Vasant Kumar Ramaswamy is founder and CEO of Scriplogix, a health care market-research and information-services company, and a former economist at the World

Bank.

Kevin A. Schulman, M.D., MBA, is a professor of medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine and a professor of business administration at Duke University’s Fuqua

School of Business. He also holds appointments at the Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care in the Durham VA Medical Center, the Duke Center for Clinical Health Policy

Research, and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine.

Related Topics: HEALTH | INNOVATION

This article is about EDUCATION

FOLLOW THIS TOPIC

Comments

Leave a Comment

P O S T

REPLY 0 0

11 COMMENTS

Sergio Stagnaro 2 days ago

As a Clinician,i.e., who is taking part in a exstinguishing class, I think that to bridge the gap between rising costs in Health Care which depletes, we have to consider a

simple. frequent clinical case. An old, 74-aged patient complains of sudden epigastric pain, nausea, vomiting, impaired balance, view alteration, dizzines. The doctors who

are not up-dated in physical Semeiotics send immediately such a pazient to Emergency Room. On the contrary, up-dated physicians are able to recognized with a

stehoscope Brain X Synfrome brought about by u virus: http://www.nexusacademicpublishers.com/table_contents_detail/2/44. Do you understand what I mean?

POSTING GUIDELINES

We hope the conversations that take place on HBR.org will be energetic, constructive, and thought-provoking. To comment, readers must sign in or register. And to ensure the quality of the discussion, our moderating team

will review all comments and may edit them for clarity, length, and relevance. Comments that are overly promotional, mean-spirited, or off-topic may be deleted per the moderators' judgment. All postings become the

property of Harvard Business Publishing.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION