Part One
Once again, another President begins the process of 'reforming' the US healthcare system. This drama has played out over and over again for decades...with healthcare emerging as an enormous drain on current American productivity. Swaddled in the protective monopoly of the medical industrial complex, innovation from the US healthcare system has stagnated and costs have soared.
Do we remember the amusement shown for the first six Honda employees that opened shop in Los Angeles in 1959? Honda is now the largest engine manufacture in the world and has surpassed Chrysler in vehicle sales here in the US.
Seeing that the healthcare industry has generally adopted the assembly line methods of Henry Ford, it is not much of a stretch to imagine the parallel destinies of industries who have internalized the belief that they have no global competitive threats.
For the first time, the US healthcare system is now faced with global competition.
And while the headlines read "US-trained physician performs $100,000 heart surgery for $16,000 in New Delhi," there are few details as to how these hospitals provide the highest medical outcomes for the lowest cost in the world.
In their excellent report Lessons From India in Organizational Innovation: A Tale of Two Heart Hospitals, Barak D. Richman, Krishna Udayakumar, Will Mitchell and Kevin Schulman published in Health Affairs, Vol. 27, Nov. 5, 2008 use the examples of two IndUShealth network hospitals, Fortis Hospitals in New Delhi and Narayana Hrudayalaya Heart Hospital in Bangalore, to highlight the divergent trajectories of innovation between the US and India.
There is a lot more going on here than low labor costs. I would like to highlight these textbook examples of innovation throughout the following posts, and explore why they can't be duplicated in the US.
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