Publications

27 Dec 2014
Working Paper Summaries

How Should We Pay for Health Care?

Keywords: by Michael E. Porter & Robert S. Kaplan; Health

04 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Is Health Care Making You Better—or Dead?

innovations and entrepreneurs in health services to spring up. But we don't. I have an acquaintance, Garrison Bliss, who is a Harvard Medical School doctor, and his brother-in-law is Norman Wu, a software... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Health

September 1985 (Revised July 2007)
Case

Population Services International: The Social Marketing Project in Bangladesh

By: V. Kasturi Rangan

Population Services International (PSI) was a not-for-profit agency founded to disseminate family planning information and to market birth control products, primarily in less developed countries seeking to curb their population explosions. In 1976, PSI concluded an... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Health; Marketing Strategy; Social Marketing; Business and Government Relations; Nonprofit Organizations; Bangladesh

22 May 2020
In Practice

Post-COVID Health Care: More Screens, Less Red Tape?

high-paying ones. Wherever possible, health care professionals have shifted from their normal service lines to serve COVID patients. Primary care provider offices and outpatient View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

2025
Working Paper

Expert Patients’ Use of Avoidable Health Care

By: Amitabh Chandra, Pragya Kakani and Simone Matecna

We measure whether expert patients – those trained as physicians and nurses – have fewer emergency department visits and the reasons for these differences. Relative to similar patients physicians and nurses had 19.8% and 5.1% fewer ED visits, principally due to fewer... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Service Delivery; Health Industry

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04 Apr 2011
Research & Ideas

Attention Medical Shoppers: What Health Care Can Learn from Walmart and Amazon

that the system isn't set up to incentivize health care workers to do that. "The reason it's never done is that nobody gets paid to do it .there's no incentive to do anything," Cutler said. View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

August 1986 (Revised February 1991)
Supplement

Population Services International: The Social Marketing Project in Bangladesh, Video

By: V. Kasturi Rangan

Population Services International, a not-for-profit agency founded to promote family planning information and to market birth control products, had an agreement with the government of Bangladesh to conduct a social marketing program using modern marketing techniques to... View Details

Keywords: Social Marketing; Health; Advertising; Marketing; Nonprofit Organizations; Government and Politics; Agreements and Arrangements; Health Industry; Bangladesh

September 2014 (Revised March 2016)
Case

Mayo Clinic: The 2020 Initiative

By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Robert S. Huckman and Jenny Lesser

Describes the challenges facing Dr. John Noseworthy, President and CEO, in implementing a long-term strategy for the growth of the Mayo Clinic—a leading academic medical center with a reputation for excellence in tertiary and quaternary health care. The case highlights... View Details

Keywords: Health; Health Care Industry; Health Care Policy; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; United States

June 10, 2021
Article

Preparing Hospitals for the Next Pandemic

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Barak D. Richman

The COVID-19 epidemic response has shown that the U.S. is blessed with heroic physicians and other health care providers, researchers, and facilities. But it has also revealed a health care system that was woefully unprepared for the surge of pandemic patients. In the... View Details

Keywords: Hospital; Hospital Management; Hospitals—administration; Health Care; Health Care Industry; Health Care Investment; Health Care Operations; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Operations; Performance Improvement; Investment; Health Industry; United States

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2015
Working Paper

Do-gooders and Go-getters: Career Incentives, Selection, and Performance in Public Service Delivery

By: Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera and Scott S. Lee

We study how career incentives affect who selects into public health jobs and, through selection, their performance while in service. We collaborate with the Government of Zambia to experimentally vary the salience of career incentives in a newly created health worker... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Health Industry; Zambia

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July 1996 (Revised August 2024)
Case

Innovative Opportunities to Manage Health Care Delivery

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and D. Scott Lurding

The purpose of this case is: To familiarize the students with the changing landscape of health care delivery, through chains of retail medical centers and those offering value-based care (VBC).

To discuss fundamental managerial decisions about their... View Details

Keywords: Managed Care; Capitation; Strategy

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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02 Mar 2007
What Do You Think?

What Is the Government’s Role in US Health Care?

Butler believes that it could come in the form of a two-tiered system of private treatment at personal expense layered on a service free to all with protections for healthcare givers and the elimination of third party insurance. Are these... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Health

07 Mar 2000
Research & Ideas

Putting Health Care Consumers in the Driver’s Seat

A mid-November conference on consumer-driven health care attracted nearly two hundred providers of health-care services, technology, and information; government professionals; and insurance executives to the HBS campus for a two-day... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Health

October 14, 2019
Article

How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Health Care Delivery

By: Samantha F. Sanders, Mats Terwiesch, William J. Gordon and Ariel Dora Stern

The development of intelligent machines holds great promise for making health care delivery more accurate, efficient, and accessible, but challenges remain for incorporating AI into clinical and administrative settings. View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Health Care and Treatment; Service Delivery; Technological Innovation; AI and Machine Learning

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26 Jun 2000
Research & Ideas

What’s an Internet Business Model? Ask a Health Care Professional

by panelist Andy Slavitt (HBS MBA '93), Founder, President and CEO of Healthallies.com, is an exchange that links patients with local health care providers who offer preferred rates. Services include... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Health

January 2000 (Revised October 2002)
Case

Cambridge Hospital Community Health Network - The Primary Care Unit

By: V.G. Narayanan, Lisa Brem and Ryan Moore

The Cambridge Hospital Community Health Network needed to gain a better understanding of its unit-of-service costs, which had been rising at a rate of 10% per year. The network's step-down costing system gave only aggregate costing information, and there was some... View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Health Care and Treatment; Cost Accounting; Cost; Network Effects; Health Industry; Health Industry; Massachusetts