Regina E. Herzlinger

Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She was the first woman to be tenured and chaired at Harvard Business School and serve on many established and start-up corporate health care/medical technology boards. She initiated the courses in non-profit and health care at HBS and was the first faculty member to be selected by the students as their best instructor.

Regina Herzlinger has been named the "Godmother of consumer-driven health care," because of her groundbreaking scholarly articles and books on this subject. She differed from conventional views of health care consumers, who were derogatorily described as non–compliant, illiterate, or patients, as in, “you need to be patient.” Instead, she portrayed them as busy people who are eager and capable of participating in managing their health, with appropriate, relevant, and respectful support.

Professor Herzlinger's long-predicted focus on the consumer-driven health care movement has supported the explosion of ambulatory medical centers, wearables, implantable sensors, telehealth, urgent and emergent free-standing care facilities, and the intense interest in health savings and health reimbursement accounts. She anticipates future consumer-driven health plans and delivery systems focused on specific chronic diseases and disabilities. (Regina Herzlinger, Market-Driven Health Care: Who Loses in the Transformation of America's Largest Service Industry. 1997)

Professor Herzlinger’s work focuses on the research and pedagogical activities that can help to create the public and business innovations that will reshape health care systems worldwide so they are increasingly accessible, cost-controlled, and technologically enabled. Because the components of the status quo health care systems—hospitals, pharmaceutical firms, insurers, for example—are oligopolized and uncompetitive (Regina E. Herzlinger, Barak Richman & Kevin Schulman. “Maintaining Health Care Innovations After the Pandemic,” JAMA Network, February 10^th, 2023; Regina E. Herzlinger. Who Killed Health Care? America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem – and the Consumer-Driven Cure. McGraw-Hill, 2007) and the employers and governments that should act as agents for their constituents have been notably ineffective (Regina E. Herzlinger, “In the COVID Era, Why Corporate Benefits Demand CEO, CFO Leadership.” California Management Review, Forthcoming 2023), innovation must be consumer-driven (Regina E. Herzlinger. Consumer-Driven Health Care: Implications for Providers, Payers, and Policymakers. Jossey-Bass, 2004.)

Two current main tranches of Regi’s work are aimed at public policy innovation that will give consumers the two resources they buy to drive innovation – money, so they can reward innovators, and transparency, so they can tell a good innovation from a bad one. Currently, employers and government control the funds used to buy health care and health care transparency is an oxymoronic phrase. HBS research has simulated that giving consumers the funds currently spent by their employers to buy health insurance and requiring them to buy insurance that complies with current requirements, will increase after tax income by $151 billion, taxes by $124 billion, and control health care costs as consumers opt for less health insurance coverage and more income (Regina E. Herzlinger & Barak Richman. Give Employees Cash To Purchase Their Own Health Insurance. Harvard Business Review, December 09, 2020). The improvement in income is most pronounced for lower-income employees.

She has devised the components of a health care analogue to the Securities and Exchange Commission, so employees will have the information that will enable them to, finally, evaluate the quality and cost of their purchases can purchase wisely (Regina E. Herzlinger. The U.S. Needs an SEC for Its Health Care System. Bloomberg Opinion, August 20, 2020; Regina Herzlinger & Vonnie Quinn, How the Pandemic caused ‘A Lot of Consumer-Driven Innovation,’ Bloomberg TV, October 2020. She and colleague Richard Boxer recommend a transparency  solution for hospital networks that can help to alleviate the hospital bed shortage  that occurred during the peak of COVID (Regina E. Herzlinger and Richard Boxer, “Transparency As A Solution for COVID-19 Related Hospital Capacity Issues.” Health Affairs, February 18, 2022) ,which is under consideration by the US Congress.

Because success in innovation lies much more with effective implementation than with invention, Regi has also focused on a book (Innovating in Healthcare, Wiley 2024) and related field-based case studies that spell out how to create successful health care innovations and avoid failures. She has taught two popular HBS courses on the subject (Innovating in Health Care and an accompanying Field Course) that have helped to create hundreds of innovative health care firms. In addition, she created a Harvard EdX MOOC, Innovating in Healthcare, that has attracted 70,000-85.000 viewers annually since it was launched in 2015. Many of her students founded billion-dollar innovations and prominent non-profit firms and became leaders in major health corporations. Her forthcoming book Innovating in Healthcare (Wiley, 2024), contains the lessons of her courses.

Professor Herzlinger’s work is virtually unique. It is repeatedly attacked by academics, in and out of Harvard University, and the status quo stakeholders who prefer a system controlled by the government to one driven by consumers, but abetted by the government. Some of them confuse universal health insurance coverage, which she supports, with complete governmental provision of health care. Although her early critiques of holy health care grails -- such as nonprofit hospitals (once depicted as saintly but now widely recognized as greedy as businesses); transparency (consumers were “illiterate”); ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations – integrated health care providers that were to fly in the face of the miserable results achieved in integrations elsewhere in the economy and to provide everything for everybody) – proved accurate.

Professor Herzlinger’s work received this remarkable degree of criticism, likely because she is not only consumer-oriented, but also a woman. But, unlike her colleagues, the public is highly interested in her point of view. Three of her books have been best sellers in their fields and her LinkedIn posts regularly have tens of thousands of views.

She also occasionally likes to have some fun with her writing as in, Love in the Office is Wonderful. Except for CEOs. Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School. February 20, 2020 where she discusses how finding love among your colleagues can be a wonderful thing, and not inevitably career ending. Unless, of course, you are the CEO.

Prof. Herzlinger is a successful medical technology entrepreneur with her husband, an MIT Ph.D. Physicist. Their devices, which they design and manufacture in the U.S., have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. They are working on new ideas and have formed a charity to promulgate education in healthcare innovation.