Publications

September 2017 (Revised February 2018)
Case

Becton Dickinson: Global Health Strategy

By: Mark R. Kramer and Sarah Mehta

Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) was a medical technology firm headquartered in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, with 43,000 employees and 2016 revenues of $12.5 billion. For several years, the company had pursued developing products that created shared value, defined as... View Details

Keywords: Shared Value; Creating Shared Value; Odon Device; Medical Technology; Value Creation; Values and Beliefs; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Health Testing and Trials; Emerging Markets; Social Issues; Competitive Strategy; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; Africa; Asia; Middle East

30 May 2007
Research & Ideas

Health Care Under a Research Microscope

including Bohmer, a physician; Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic; Raymond Gilmartin, former chairman, president, and CEO of Merck & Co.; Robert Huckman, a former health care consultant and now Faculty Research Fellow... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Health; Health

May 2016
Background Note

Health Systems in the Developing World

By: Kevin Schulman, Muhammed Pate and Gary Carbell

This note offers an approach to the evaluation of health care markets globally. It prepares students with a set of questions about the organization of core elements of the health care system. The organization of these elements can vary across markets and can vary in... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Developing Countries and Economies; Public Sector; Private Sector; Opportunities; Analysis

Article

Private Enterprise for Public Health

By: Michael Chu and David E. Bloom

By many measures, the world today is a healthier place than ever before, yet a daunting set of deficits and disparities remains to be tackled. For various reasons, it is not clear that the traditional tandem of government and civil society are up to those challenges.... View Details

Keywords: Private Ownership; Social Enterprise; Public Sector; Private Sector; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

13 Dec 2006
Research & Ideas

Improving Public Health for the Poor

School of Public Health, Project Antares aims to create a system for devising commercial incentives that provide affordable public health initiatives, or "interventions" in healthcare parlance. Examples of commercial high-impact... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Health

13 Jul 2009
Research & Ideas

Diagnosing the Public Health Care Alternative

As health insurance reform is hotly debated in Washington, DC, what strategies should be central for the benefit of patients' health? HBS faculty with expertise in business administration, economic... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Health

April 2006
Case

Finance Leadership in Novartis Consumer Health Businesses

By: Boris Groysberg and Ingrid Vargas

Describes and contrasts the roles and challenges of three high-performing finance heads at Novartis Consumer Health businesses in Australia, Japan, and Venezuela. All three faced tremendous pressures in terms of managing time and limited resources, but the particular... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Financial Management; Multinational Firms and Management; Leadership Style; Health Industry; Japan; Australia; Venezuela

May 25, 2016
Comment

How Consumers and Businesses are Reshaping Public Health

By: John A. Quelch

Healthcare and education are two issues in which citizens around the world, rich and poor, are passionately interested. It has long been appreciated that the way that a society treats its youngest and oldest members says much about its moral maturity. Economic... View Details

October 24, 2018
Article

End the Corporate Health Care Tax

By: Mark R. Kramer and John Pontillo

Imagine if a single piece of legislation could effectively eliminate all U.S. corporate taxes, subsidize hundreds of millions of dollars in new corporate investment, increase the take-home pay of most U.S. employees, ease state and local budgets, and reduce the U.S.... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Taxation; Health Care and Treatment; Insurance; Taxation; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; United States

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04 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Is Health Care Making You Better—or Dead?

status quo—but his cure is a government-run system, I gather from hearsay. I agree with the diagnosis, but my cure is, yes, everybody should have health insurance, but they should control it for themselves. It should be run by the people,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Health

Article

Beyond Statistics: The Economic Content of Risk Scores

By: Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Paul Schrimpf

"Big data" and statistical techniques to score potential transactions have transformed insurance and credit markets. In this paper, we observe that these widely-used statistical scores summarize a much richer heterogeneity, and may be endogenous to the context in which... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Risk and Uncertainty; Insurance Industry

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September 2011
Article

How to Solve the Cost Crisis in Health Care

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Michael E. Porter

Existing health care costing systems have serious flaws that make it impossible to measure costs accurately at the individual patient and medical condition level. This gap has severely limited meaningful cost reduction throughout the system. The paper describes a new... View Details

Keywords: Cost; Health Care and Treatment; Measurement and Metrics; Service Delivery; Outcome or Result; Quality; Health Industry

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November 2024
Article

The Health Costs of Cost Sharing

By: Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack and Ziad Obermeyer

What happens when patients suddenly stop their medications? We study the health consequences of drug interruptions caused by large, abrupt, and arbitrary changes in price. Medicare’s prescription drug benefit as-if-randomly assigns 65-year-olds a drug budget as a... View Details

Keywords: Outcome or Result; Health Care and Treatment; Budgets and Budgeting; Cost

28 Sep 2020
Working Paper Summaries

What Can Economics Say About Alzheimer's Disease?

Keywords: by Amitabh Chandra, Courtney Coile, and Corina Mommaerts; Health; Health

Teaching Interest

Managing Global Health: Applying Behavioral Economics to Create Impact (MBA)

Health, and development more broadly, is not something we give to people: it is something they produce themselves, interacting with supply-side and institutional factors. This course trains students to see through the lens of the end-user and to use the levers of... View Details

09 Jan 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Economic Transition and Private-Sector Labor Demand: Evidence from Urban China

Keywords: by Lakshmi Iyer, Xin Meng, Nancy Qian & Xiaoxue Zhao

03 Sep 2020
Op-Ed

Why American Health Care Needs Its Own SEC

medicine. They do not know if they received good value for the money. Partially as a result of this lack of transparency, increases in employers’ health care costs have outstripped inflation and workers’ wage increases for decades.... View Details

Keywords: by Regina E. Herzlinger; Health

Research Summary

Overview

We are studying the practical application of Michael Porter's value-based strategy to reform health care by examining best practices of integrated practice units, outcome measurement, cost measurement, value-based payment, episode based payment, regionalization of... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; Health Care Outcomes; Healthcare IT; Health Care Quality; Health Economics; Value Agenda; Information Technology; Mobile App; Big Data; Electronic Health Records; Pers; Value Creation; Information Technology Industry; United States

October 2005 (Revised June 2007)
Case

Apollo Hospitals--First-World Health Care at Emerging-Market Prices

By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Tarun Khanna and Carin-Isabel Knoop

The Apollo Hospitals Group, one of Asia's premier health care organizations, had come to rival the best health care organizations on the globe. Apollo offered advanced medical procedures, such as cardiac surgery using the beating heart technique, at very high levels of... View Details

Keywords: Vertical Integration; Decision Choices and Conditions; Health Care and Treatment; Global Strategy; Developing Countries and Economies; Health Industry; Thailand; United States; India