Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,031)
- Faculty Publications (484)
- Article
Can Big-Box Retailers Provide Local Health Care?
National retailers, most notably Walmart and Best Buy, are making big bets on their ability to fill this need for local health care. At first glance, these moves are a bit surprising given that these companies have not traditionally been focused on health care... View Details
- Article
Achieving Value in Highly Complex Acute Care: Lessons from the Delivery of Extra Corporeal Life Support
By: Michael Nurok, Jonathan Warsh, Erik Dong, Jeffrey Lopez, Mayumi Kharabi and Robert S. Kaplan
We applied a value (outcomes and cost) analysis to extracorporeal life support (ECLS), a relatively rare but very expensive ICU therapy with highly variable outcomes. To address the outcome component of the value approach, we created guidelines for ECLS delivery; to... View Details
- July 2019
- Article
Evaluation of Economic and Clinical Outcomes Under Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Mandatory Bundled Payments for Joint Replacements
By: Derek A. Haas, Xiaoran Zhang, Robert S. Kaplan and Zirui Song
In 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched its first mandatory bundled payment program, the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) model, by randomizing metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) into the payment model. The paper analyzed... View Details
- Article
Reverse the Curse of the Top-5
By: Robert S. Kaplan
The past 40 years has seen a large increase in the number of articles submitted to journals ranked in the top-5 of their discipline. This increase is the rational response, by faculty, to the overweighting of publications in these journals by university promotions and... View Details
- November 2018
- Case
Swissgrid: Enterprise Risk Management in a Digital Age
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes
Kurt Meyer, chief risk officer of Swissgrid, the Swiss national electricity transmission system operator, reflects on the risk management system he installed after the deregulation and liberalization of the European energy market. With 41 connections to other European... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Reverse the Curse of the Top-5
By: Robert S. Kaplan
The past 40 years has seen a large increase in the number of articles submitted to journals ranked in the top-5 of their discipline. This increase is the rational response, by faculty, to the overweighting of publications in these journals by university promotions and... View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Discretionary Task Ordering: Queue Management in Radiological Services
By: Maria Ibanez, Jonathan R. Clark, Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
Work-scheduling research typically prescribes task sequences implemented by managers. Yet employees often have discretion to deviate from their prescribed sequence. Using data from 2.4 million radiological diagnoses, we find that doctors prioritize similar tasks... View Details
Keywords: Discretion; Scheduling; Queue; Healthcare; Learning; Experience; Decentralization; Operations; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Performance; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Efficiency; Performance Improvement; Performance Productivity; Decisions; Time Management; Cost vs Benefits; Health Industry
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Creative Consulting Company
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Richard Nolan and David P. Norton
During the past 50 years, several consulting companies introduced important new ideas that extended management theory and improved management practice. This paper draws upon public sources and the authors’ personal experiences to describe how three management... View Details
- Article
Defining, Measuring, and Improving Value in Spine Care
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Derek Haas
This chapter discusses how to measure and improve spine care outcomes and costs. Today’s commonly used outcome metrics, such as readmission and complication rates, are actually process and quality metrics. They are not the outcomes, such as improvement in pain and... View Details
- May 2018
- Case
Kaiser Permanente Colorado: Primary Care Plus
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Mahek A. Shah
A geriatrician in Kaiser Permanente’s Colorado region is concerned with the high and growing cost of treating the elderly population. She introduces a new care model, Primary Care Plus, using an interdisciplinary team of a primary care doctor, palliative care... View Details
- March 2018
- Article
Hospital Budget Systems are Holding Back Innovation
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Michael S. Jellinek and Derek A. Haas
Nearly 800 digital health startups were funded in 2017, an all-time high. Each of the new companies offers the hope of transforming the performance of the U.S. health care system. The audience for such innovation wants to be receptive: A recent American Hospital... View Details
- March 2018
- Supplement
Improving Access at VA
By: Ryan W. Buell and Robert S. Huckman
In 2015, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) ran the largest healthcare system in the United States, with over 1,700 sites of care that served nearly 9 million veterans. One year earlier, a scandal had erupted over a cover-up of the excessive wait times veterans... View Details
- March 2018 (Revised February 2020)
- Teaching Note
Improving Access at VA
By: Ryan W. Buell and Robert S. Huckman
In 2015, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) ran the largest healthcare system in the United States, with over 1,700 sites of care that served nearly 9 million veterans. One year earlier, a scandal had erupted over a cover-up of the excessive wait times veterans... View Details
- March 2018
- Teaching Note
Twine Health
By: Robert S. Huckman and Ariel D. Stern
In late 2014, Dr. John Moore (CEO), Frank Moss (chairman), and Scott Gilroy (CTO) of Twine Health (Twine) had to resolve several challenges that threatened to restrict the widespread dissemination of its sole product, Twine. Twine was a cloud-based platform that... View Details
- Article
Administrative Costs Associated with Physician Billing and Insurance-Related Activities at an Academic Health Care System
By: Phillip Tseng, Robert S. Kaplan, Barak D. Richman, Mahek A. Shah and Kevin A. Schulman
The federal government mandated adoption of certified electronic health record systems (EHR), at least in part, to reduce administrative costs for physicians. This study used time-driven activity-based costing to determine the administrative costs associated with... View Details
- January 2018
- Case
Partners In Health: Costing Primary Care in Haiti
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Mahek A. Shah
Partners in Health, a global NGO focused on delivering health care to residents of rural underserved communities, conducts a project on the cost of primary care at five sites in the Central Highlands of Haiti. It devises a simple approach for tracking the resources... View Details
- January–February 2018
- Article
Inclusive Growth: Profitable Strategies for Tackling Poverty and Inequality
By: Robert S. Kaplan, George Serafeim and Eduardo Tugendhat
More than a billion people in the developing world remain in extreme poverty and outside the formal economy. Traditional CSR programs have done little to alleviate the situation and rarely produce transformative change.
Instead of trying to fix local problems,... View Details
Instead of trying to fix local problems,... View Details
Keywords: Inclusive Growth; Sustainability; Social Impact; Business Strategy; Shared Value; Impact Investing; Inequality; Corporate Governance; Balanced Scorecard; Strategy Execution; Economic Growth; Developing Countries and Economies; Poverty; Equality and Inequality; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Strategy; Investment
- December 2017
- Article
Overall Cost Comparison of Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Procedures with Endoscopist- or Anesthesia-Supported Sedation by Activity-Based Costing Techniques
By: Richard A. Helmers, James A. Dilling, Christopher R. Chaffee, Mark V. Larson, Bradly J. Narr, Derek A. Haas and Robert S. Kaplan
Endoscopic/Colonoscopic procedures are done either with gastroenterologist-administered conscious sedation or with anesthesia-administered sedation with propofol. Anesthesia-administered sedation has medical and patient benefits but is more expensive to administer. We... View Details
- Article
The IT Transformation Health Care Needs
By: Nikhil R. Sahni, Robert S. Huckman, Anuraag Chigurupati and David M. Cutler
In recent years, health care organizations have made sizable investments in information technology. They’ve used their IT systems to replace paper records with electronic ones and to improve billing processes, thereby boosting revenue. But so far, IT has been of little... View Details
- September 2017 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Intermountain Healthcare: Pursuing Precision Medicine
By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Kathy E. Giusti, Robert S. Huckman and Julia Kelley
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Intermountain Healthcare operates 23 hospitals and hundreds of clinics in Utah and Idaho and provides insurance to approximately 850,000 patients through its insurance arm, SelectHealth. In 2013, Intermountain, known for its commitment... View Details