Publications

June 2010 (Revised September 2010)
Case

athenahealth: Innovating in Response to a Crisis in Healthcare

When Jonathan Bush and his partner, Todd Park, realized that their revolutionary approach to delivering clinical care was being stymied by the inefficiencies in the healthcare system and insurance red tape, they turned their proprietary technology, athenaNet, to a new... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Information Management; Innovation and Invention; Brands and Branding; Product Development; Health Industry; United States

05 Nov 2010
News

US watching Mass. fight on health costs

April 1996 (Revised June 2001)
Case

Partners HealthCare System, Inc. (B): Cardiac Care Improvement

By: Gary P. Pisano and Maryam Golnaraghi

Explores the challenges confronting the CEO at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in the wake of radical changes in the health care environment. As pressures have risen for cost containment in health care, the hospital has embarked on a series of reengineering efforts to... View Details

Keywords: Consolidation; Health Care and Treatment; Mergers and Acquisitions; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Management Teams; Operations; Innovation and Invention; Cost Management; Health Industry; Massachusetts

08 Jan 2015
News

Healthcare strategy 2015 — Back to the basics: 12 key thoughts

Teaching Interest

Overview

By: Regina E. Herzlinger

Course Requirements

Students are required to prepare a business plan, which employs the framework of this course, to explore an entrepreneurial opportunity in health care, and to evaluate their classmates' plans.

Career Focus

For... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Healthcare Industry; Healthcare Innovation; Healthcare Costs; Healthcare Operations; Healthcare Organizations; Healthcare Startups; Healthcare Technology; Healthcare Ventures

26 Mar 2014
News

Revisiting how Christensen’s “disruption innovation” in healthcare means decentralization

01 Mar 2005
News

Better Care at Lower Cost

The U.S. health-care industry isn’t immune to the forces of disruptive innovation that already have transformed other businesses, from computer manufacturing to retailing, HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen told 250 participants at the fifth annual Alumni View Details

Keywords: Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services; Health, Social Assistance

September 2015 (Revised February 2023)
Case

Emdeon's Acquisition of Change Healthcare: Innovating Transparency Solutions for Health Care Consumers

By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Jeet Guram and Aanchal Raj

Case describes acquisition of Change Healthcare, which provides health care cost and quality information, by Emdeon, a health information exchange, and discusses health care transparency. Emdeon is a billion-dollar company that has grown through acquisitions; at its... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Healthcare Industry; Healthcare Innovation; Health Care and Treatment; Acquisition; Integration; Analytics and Data Science; Mergers and Acquisitions; Competitive Strategy; Health Industry; United States

23 Mar 2010
News

Regina Herzlinger on the Passage of U.S. Healthcare Reform Legislation

September 2022
Article

Cost of Cardiac Stereotactic Body Radioablation Therapy versus Catheter Ablation for Treatment of Ventricular Tachycardia

By: Chen Wei, Michelle Boeck, Pierre C. Qian, Todd Vivenzio, Zoe Elizee, Jeremy S. Bredfeldt, Robert S. Kaplan, Usha Tedrow, Raymond Mak and Paul C. Zei

Cardiac SBRT is a novel way of treating refractory ventricular tachycardia (VT) that may be less costly than catheter ablation, owing to its noninvasive, outpatient nature. We applied time-driven activity-based costing to both procedures. The direct and total... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Activity Based Costing and Management; Cost; Health Industry

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February 2018
Case

Health Savings Accounts: Enabling Consumer Participation

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and James Wallace

Health savings accounts (HSAs), a creation of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, had become an integral part of the drive toward consumer-driven health care. Coupled with high-deductible health plans, HSAs allowed consumers to directly control a significant part of... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; Healthcare Costs; Health Insurance; Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Insurance; Innovation and Invention; Health Industry; United States

July 2016
Article

Economic Implications of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology Embryo Transfer Guidelines: Healthcare Dollars Saved by Reducing Iatrogenic Triplets

By: Malinda S. Lee, Brady T. Evans, Ariel Dora Stern and Mark D. Hornstein

Objective: To estimate the national cost savings resulting from reductions in higher-order multiple (HOM) live births (defined as three or more fetuses), following the initial publication of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) guidelines on ET in... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Cost Management; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

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Article

Ten Year Sunset Rule for Healthcare Regulation Is a Nonstarter and Discouragement to Post-COVID-19 Investment

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Eugene Schneller

U.S. healthcare delivery has not benefitted from the same productivity growth as many other service industries, such as bricks and mortar retailing, a loss that has gravely diminished cost control and access. Regulatory capture, which creates barriers to venture... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; COVID-19; Regulation; Health Care and Treatment; Health Pandemics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Investment

September 2023
Article

The Health Costs of Dirty Energy: Evidence from the Capacity Market in Colombia

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Theresa Molina, Anant Nyshadham, Jorge Tamayo and Nicholas Torres

The health effects of “dirty” (fossil fuel driven) energy production are difficult to measure accurately due to the endogeneity of fuel choice. We exploit an electricity policy in Colombia that generates a price-based trigger for the use of thermal energy sources.... View Details

Keywords: Pollution; Health Disorders; Energy Industry; Colombia

June 2017
Case

Obesity Management at Kaiser Permanente: A New Mindset for Healthcare Delivery?

By: Kevin Schulman, Gregory Leya and Christina Beveridge

Kaiser Permanente (KP) is the largest managed care organization in the United States with over 10 million members. KP evolved from a prepayment or capitation model that focuses the organization around the efficiency of care and the health of the population it serves.... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Health Care and Treatment; Business Model; Strategy; Health Industry; United States

September 2016
Article

Communicating Value in Healthcare Using Radar Charts: A Case Study of Prostate Cancer

By: Nikhil G. Thaker, Tariq N. Ali, Michael E. Porter, Thomas W. Feeley, Robert S. Kaplan and Steven J. Frank

Question: Can we create a value-based tool to visualize the outcomes and cost of various treatments that could facilitate patient-centered decision making?

Summary Answer: We developed a standardized value framework by using radar charts to visualize and... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

2017
Article

The Impact of Training Informal Healthcare Providers in India: A Randomized Controlled Trial

By: Jishnu Das, Abhijit Chowdhury, Reshmaan Hussam and Abhijit Banerjee

Health care providers without formal medical qualifications provide more than 70% of all primary care in rural India. Training these informal providers may be one way to improve the quality of care where few alternatives exist. We report on a randomized controlled... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; India; Business Training; RCT; Health Care and Treatment; Training; Performance Evaluation; Performance Improvement; India

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June 2015 (Revised May 2017)
Teaching Note

Philips Healthcare: Marketing the HealthSuite Digital Platform

By: John A. Quelch

Keywords: Healthcare; Experiential Quality; Conformance Quality; Clinical Outcomes; Cost Efficiency; Quality; Performance; Health Care and Treatment