It’s rare to read past a healthcare headline these days without encountering the word “integration” in some phrase or other, from vertical or horizontal integration; to clinical, economic or data integration. And the word’s ubiquity makes sense. Everything about U.S. healthcare is complex, from the problems it’s required to solve and the fragmented “system” through which care is funded and delivered, to the regulations intended to promote care quality, cost effectiveness and access. So it’s intuitive that industry managers pursuing ambitious goals would strive to get people, processes and resources working in alignment toward them. 

Please note that this blog was originally posted on www.christenseninstitute.org on May 4, 2017

People use the term “Disruptive Innovation” to mean a lot of different things, but it actually has a very specific definition. Disruptive Innovation is not the kind of innovation that makes good products better. It’s the kind that takes a product that’s historically been so expensive and complicated or inconvenient that few people can use it, and transforms it into one that’s so simple and affordable that a great many can do so. Examples include TurboTax tax preparation software, which disrupted accountants, and Netflix, which disrupted retail video stores.