Publications

September 2011 (Revised August 2014)
Background Note

Note on Bundled Payment in Health Care

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Charles C. Huang

The note explains how bundled health care payment differs from fee-for-service payment, provides examples of the difference between the two, describes early innovators in bundling and their results, provides guidance on how to make it happen, and elucidates the legal... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Price; Cost Management; Health Industry

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

March 2024
Article

Do Safety Management System Standards Indicate Safer Operations? Evidence from the OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Standard

By: Kala Viswanathan, Matthew S. Johnson and Michael W. Toffel

Problem definition: Given the enormous disruptions and costs of occupational injuries, companies and buyers are increasingly looking to voluntary occupational health and safety standards to improve worker safety. Yet because these standards only require... View Details

Keywords: Occupational Health; Occupational Safety; Program Evaluation; Safety Performance; Injuries; OHSAS 18001; ISO 45001; Working Conditions; Safety; Standards

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04 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Is Health Care Making You Better—or Dead?

Regina Herzlinger is not afraid to call them as she sees them. And what she sees looking at the American health care industry is a bunch of killers. Not only are hospitals, insurers, employers, Congress, and academics killing View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Health

May 2018 (Revised October 2020)
Supplement

La Ribera Health Department (B): Epilogue

By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Emer Moloney and Daniela Beyersdorfer

The La Ribera case studies depict an innovative low cost/high quality privately financed hospital model struggling to achieve alignment with the Six Factors. It is reimbursed by the public sector in a Spanish environment whose Consumers, Structure, and Public Policy... View Details

Keywords: Trends And Opportunities; Government; Government Programs; Acquisition; Business Model; Business Plan; Trends; Opportunities; Government and Politics; Programs; Health Care and Treatment; Situation or Environment; Health Industry; Health Industry; Health Industry; Spain

05 Sep 2012
What Do You Think?

Will Business Management Save US Health Care?

for-profit health care organization led to better patient outcomes at the same time that "provider engagement and feeling of satisfaction have increased, our costs have fallen and our net profit has... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Health

03 Dec 2020
Research & Ideas

Cut Payroll Costs with Transparency, Fairness, and Compassion

workweeks, unpaid leave, pay freezes, elimination of bonuses, a freeze on 401(k) matching, and reduced vacation allowance. Some CEOs believe salary cuts are a way to spread the pain of reducing salary costs across a broad number of... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Sarah Abbott

July, 2022
Article

Telehealth Visits After Shoulder Surgery: Higher Patient Satisfaction and Lower Costs

By: Evan A. O'Donnell, Jillian E. Haberli, Andres Muniz Martinez, Daniel Yagoda, Robert S. Kaplan and Jon J.P. Warner

Purpose and Methods: The study compared the cost of telemedicine visits with in-person clinic visits for routine follow-up after common shoulder surgeries. It also evaluated the safety and patient experience with telemedicine visits. Time-driven activity-based costing... View Details

Keywords: Telehealth; Patient Satisfaction; Health Care and Treatment; Communication Technology; Health Industry

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February 2012 (Revised June 2013)
Case

Moving to Universal Coverage: Health Care Reform in Massachusetts

By: Michael E. Porter and Jennifer F Baron

State health care reform in Massachusetts has involved a phased process, focusing first on coverage expansion and then turning to delivery system innovation and cost containment. In 2006, the state adopted an individual mandate to obtain health care coverage which,... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Business and Government Relations; Insurance; Massachusetts

Research Summary

Consumerism and the Distributed Delivery of Health Care

By: Robert S. Huckman

This stream of Professor Huckman's work examines the growing tendency for health care to be delivered in a more distributed manner. Examples of this phenomenon include health IT, teleradiology, medical travel, remote monitoring of chronic medical conditions, and retail... View Details

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

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’... View Details

Keywords: by Regina E. Herzlinger; Health

August 1993
Article

Transaction Cost Theory: Inferences from Clinical Field Research

By: Frank V. Cespedes

Keywords: Cost; Theory; Research; Health

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January 2024
Article

Cost of Exempting Sole Orphan Drugs from Medicare Negotiation

By: Matthew Vogel, Olivia Zhao, William B. Feldman, Amitabh Chandra, Aaron S. Kesselheim and Benjamin N. Rome

Importance: The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) requires Medicare to negotiate prices for some high-spending drugs but exempts drugs approved solely for the treatment of a single rare disease.
Objective: To estimate Medicare spending and global... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Insurance; Price; Health Industry

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02 Mar 2007
What Do You Think?

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

government's role in U.S. healthcare? What do you think? To Read More: Robert H. Frank, "A Health Care Plan So Simple, Even Stephen Colbert Couldn't Simplify It," The New York Times, February 18, 2007, p. C3. He is the author of a book,... 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

August 23, 2018
Article

Using a New EHR System to Increase Patient Engagement, Improve Efficiency, and Decrease Cost

By: Katy French, Barbra Bryce Speer, Alexis B. Guzman, Tayab Andrabi, Iris Recinos, Keith A. Shook, James R. Incalcaterra, John C. Frenzel and Thomas W. Feeley

Patients and providers are frustrated with seemingly endless data entry. We used our patients’ vested interest in their own health care by actively engaging them in the entry of their own medical information into the EHR. Prior to the implementation of the new EHR we... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Analytics and Data Science; Performance Efficiency; Cost Management