Wednesday 12 November 2014

Bridging Health Care’s Innovation-Education Gap

Despite the excellence of its delivery, insurance, and technology components, the health care sector in the United States is plagued with sky-high costs, unequal access, and erratic quality. cheap dissertation writing service. This predicament continues to create a major drag on the U.S. economy.

Bridging Health Care

According to an analysis by McKinsey, while the productivity of the U.S. computer and semiconductor industry grew by 7.6% per year in the 1990-2007 period, the productivity of the U.S. health care industry dropped by 0.8% annually.  To change this grim statistic, the pace of innovation must dramatically increase. But to achieve that, we must alter how we educate future health care leaders. Despite the health care sector’s massive share of America’s GDP, most graduate health care administration and MD/MBA programs have not aligned their curricula to address the need for innovation.

In our interviews with 58 CEOs in the health care sector about their organizations’ future needs, the words they most used were change and innovation. (The 58 included leaders of delivery, insurance, med tech, biopharma, and IT organizations and ministers of health.) They wanted people who can investigate problems, find solutions through process and organizational innovation, and drive them forward — people who can work on a diverse team, understand failure and its causes, and manage change.

But our analysis of health-care-related curricula at 26 top U.S. schools that offer graduate degrees in health care administration found the most frequently used words were policy and organization. Innovation and entrepreneur were used only 27 times.

At far too many programs, curricula focus on isolated subjects — such as health policy, analytics, quantitative problem solving — that are taught primarily through lectures in theoretical settings. Despite the excellence of the individual faculties, programs, and schools, this siloed, abstract approach does not meet the needs of future innovators. dissertation writing service UK. Many CEOs have been so dissatisfied with traditional education for health care administrators that they have had their organizations develop training programs of their own.

Our surveys indicated that many academics in the field of health care administration agree that schools are not educating students to be able to create badly needed new processes, systems, and organizational forms and to solve problems and implement solutions across a range of business processes.

Separate analyses of medical school curricula reached similar conclusions: A Lancet article, for example, called for global change to promote transformative professional education that harnesses flows of educational content and innovation.

The CEOs we interviewed do not believe that academia alone should shoulder the burden of fixing this problem. We agree. Business leaders can and should partner with educators to accelerate this improvement in pedagogical techniques by pursuing these transformative activities:

Team teaching. The CEOs want to provide input on program design and teaching, and many would be willing to guest-lecture or co-teach. If a faculty member lacks the relevant real-world experience, the remedy is to have him or her team up with an entrepreneur, a strategist, or an innovator to teach and help solve local and global practical problems. In an MBA course Innovating in Health Care that one of us (Regina) teaches at Harvard Business School (HBS), for example, two health-care-reimbursement specialists participate in a session to assist students in developing business plans. As a result of one plan (developed by a team of Harvard MBA and School of Public Health students), a large U.S. health insurance company will reimburse on-demand jet service for kidney transplantation.

Mentoring. Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneur in Residence program is an example of an organized campus activity that brings health care innovators in contact with students. Entrepreneurs-in-residence serve for the entire academic year in a part-time capacity, meeting with students in group and one-on-one sessions and collaborating with various faculty members on cases, courses, research, and other activities.

Case studies. Case studies of successes and failures (especially failures) are essential. Business leaders could partner with academics to develop them and appear in classes when they are taught. (The CEOs of a number of health care companies from around the world lectured in the HBS course Innovating in Health Care when cases on their organizations were taught. They included Amil, Fortis Healthcare, McKesson, PAREXEL International, and the Vitality Group.)

Field projects and apprenticeships. The CEOs feel that field work and formal internships can offer lessons the classroom cannot. Formal residencies, apprenticeships, or field-study courses that place the student in a health care environment will help inform future innovators about the real-world challenges facing health care systems in the 21st century and the difficulties likely to be encountered in implementing solutions. Five new health care businesses resulted from the field studies in the 2013 Innovating in Health Care course, including an ambulatory pediatric surgery center for Medicaid recipients and a hospital in Nigeria.

Rewards and incentives. While traditional classroom, online, and blended courses may remain mainstays of health care education, the future challenge will be to integrate the classroom into the real world. To achieve this, current faculty incentives, which are often focused primarily on research and publications, should be strengthened to recognize excellence in teaching and reforming the curriculum.

Accreditation and standards. Accreditation programs for U.S. medical and health administration schools lack specific requirements for core competencies related to innovation. Similarly, courses for the maintenance of a medical license have no specific emphasis on innovation. Ranking of educational programs by third parties and other formal and informal governance processes also do not stress innovation. To address these deficiencies, the business community should collaborate with accreditation, licensure, and ranking programs to create innovation standards. In addition, it should consider working with schools’ admissions programs to offer student loans and other incentives for students who demonstrate interest and competence in becoming innovators.

These activities require greater commitment by business — a shift from trying to alleviate the symptoms of an anachronistic educational system toward a partnership that can help improve global health care systems in a lasting and meaningful way. To encourage this partnership, a group representing global academic institutions, professional organizations, and health care consultancies formed the Global Educators Network for Health Care Innovation Education (GENIE) Group.

The goal of the organization, which includes us, is to make innovation a central part of the education of future leaders in health care. To advance it, we have already held two annual conferences with 150 global academic and stakeholder attendees at Harvard Business School and Duke University, launched the Harvard edX program Innovating in Health Care and the HBS Executive Education course Business Innovations in Global Health Care, created an archive of innovative programs, and surveyed a wide range of constituents to help develop the competencies they deemed necessary in an innovation curriculum.

With activities like these, we aim to encourage business leaders and academics to create health care administration education more focused on innovation.

Health-care-administration education is at a crossroads similar to one that business schools were at in the late 1970s, when courses that emphasized entrepreneurship were almost non-existent. To change this, business schools developed a network of entrepreneurs who partnered with faculty to guest lecture, develop case studies, and provide intellectual, financial, and moral support. (See Shaping the Waves: A History of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School.) Entrepreneurship is now a vital component of almost all business administration programs and has played an important role in the U.S. economy.

That success demonstrates that academics and business leaders can join forces once again to transform the way that future health care leaders are educated. By working together to integrate the classroom into the real world, they can help schools produce the innovators that health care organizations deeply need.

Related Videos and Other Resources: For more information on this topic, watch Professor Herzlinger explain the need for innovation and how to make it happen in health-care-administration education; hear from some of the leading global health care CEOs and academics who  support innovation in health care; and see some of the innovative ventures in health care started by students. The CEO champions of this movement can be found here. The academic supporters of this movement are listed on the GENiE website. Finally, this video is the introduction to the MOOC version of Innovating in Health Care.

Post Credit: HBR

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