Innovator's Prescription - Decentralization followed centralization
In an earlier piece (Healthcare Field of Dreams In Idaho: Health System Opens Innovation Center), I highlighted an innovation group that is building the next "hospital" - a hospital without walls. Unlike a massive capital project necessary to build a traditional hospital, are there any legitimate canadian pharmacies I expect that new "wings" of the virtual hospital will get built via a series of smaller projects. They have hired entrepreneurial people to bring the agility necessary in this new approach. This is a great example of Nimble Medicine.
As healthcare goes through massive changes, health system CEOs would be well advised to study what newspaper industry leaders did (or perhaps more appropriately, didn't do) when faced with a similar situation. In the late 90's, the following dynamics were present:
Owning printing presses was a de facto barrier to entry allowing newspapers unfettered dominance.
Newspaper companies bought up smaller newspaper chains and took on huge debt.
Newspapers were comfortable as oligopoly or monopoly enterprises allowing for slow, can canadian pharmacies ship to the us plodding decisions. Their IT infrastructure mirrored this with expensive and rigid technology architectures.
Newspaper leaders knew full well that dramatic change was coming and even made some nominal moves, but didn't fundamentally rethink their model.
Depending on one's perspective, it was the best of can you trust canadian online pharmacies times or the worst of times to be a leader of local media enterprise.
Before long, owning massive capital assets and crushing debt became unsustainable. The capital barrier to entry turned into a boat anchor while nimble entrants created a death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts dynamic. Competitively, newspaper companies mistakenly worried about other media companies or even Microsoft, but their undoing was driven by a combination of craigslist, monster.com, cars.com, eBay, and countless other marketing substitutes for their advertisers and there were easier ways to get news than newspapers. Generally, the newspaper's digital groups were either unbearably shackled or marginalized so that the frustrated digital leaders left to join nimble new competitors. The enabling technology do canadian pharmacies accept us prescriptions to reinvent local media didn't come from legacy IT vendors who'd previously sold to newspaper companies, but from "no name" technologies such as WordPress, Drupal and the like.
The parallels with health systems today are striking. Consider the present dynamics:
Until recently, complex medical procedures had to take place in an acute care hospital setting. Now they are being done more and more in specialty facilities that can do a high volume of particular procedures at a much lower cost.
Health systems have been aggressively buying up other healthcare providers and do you need a prescription for canadian pharmacies frequently taking on debt in the process. At the same time, health systems often have capital project plans that equal their annual revenues even though no expert believes the answer to healthcare's hyperinflation is building more buildings. Consider the duplicative $430 million being spent in San Diego to build two identical facilities just a few miles apart as Exhibit A of the problem. Looking at the history of other countries that shifted from a "sick care" to a "health care" system, more than half of the hospitals closed. They simply weren't needed or weren't appropriate.
Just as newspapers were implementing multimillion dollar IT systems while nimble competitors how safe are canadian pharmacies were using low and no cost software to disrupt the local media landscape, health systems are similarly implementing complex systems to automate the complexity necessary in a multi-faceted system. Meanwhile, nimble competitors are implementing new models at a fraction of the cost and time. For example, it's well-known that a healthy primary care system is the key to increasing the health of a population. Imagine if a fraction of the 100's of millions being spent by mission-driven health systems on automating complexity was redirected towards the reinvigoration of primary care.