An Excerpt from The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care
“The current health-care system generally is modular. Specialized companies operate hospitals, process paperwork, negotiate blanket service contracts, and manage outpatient and retail clinics. Most doctors’ offices are set up as independent businesses. Each can improve its piece of the system, but that’s all. When there are interdependencies among the elements of the disruptive value network — meaning that one cannot occur unless others do — the speed of disruption is significantly accelerated when an integrated entity wraps its arms around all the elements in order to orchestrate the changes. As an illustration, when color television was invented, nobody would buy color TVs because no network was broadcasting in color. And networks would not broadcast in color because nobody owned color televisions. It took David Sarnoff, whose company RCA acquired NBC, to implement color television in that chicken-and-egg situation. Similarly, health-care systems will need to integrate so that they can wrap their arms around all the pieces of the system that must be interdependently reconfigured.”
