Illustration by Andrea Manzati

You'll see a theme emerge in this issue's stories on health care: The industry has a number of deep-seated challenges that it is just beginning to face. It's a pen-and-paper operation in a digital world. It struggles with inefficiency while working for a clientele that can't afford any lost time. You know—the perfect kind of challenge for the HBS community.

Last year, HBS and Harvard Medical School's Forum on Healthcare Innovation brought together everyone from biotech execs to policymakers in an effort to spur innovation. With input from more than 200 industry leaders and academics, the forum identified a number of important challenges, and offered five "key imperatives" for progress—from making value the central objective to decentralizing care delivery.

Several HBS alumni and faculty members are also leading efforts that provide prescriptions for what ails the industry ("Curing Health Care"), including Halle Tecco's (MBA 2011) focus on incubating new ideas and Gregory Stock's (MBA 1987) push to make medicine more personalized.

WILLIAMS

Photo by Mark Ostow

The energy behind these ideas originates in the HBS community's desire to fix intractable problems. But the inspiration typically comes from a very human place. DART Therapeutics CEO Gene Williams (MBA 1987) ("Your Own Medicine"), for instance, told us about a revelation he had during a 2002 trip to Rotterdam to observe clinical trials for the first-ever Pompe disease treatment, which was pushed forward by John Crowley (MBA 1997), whose son and daughter suffer from the rare, often fatal neuromuscular disorder.

Williams, then working for Genzyme, was walking around a hospital with the trial's investigators and came upon a group of patients who looked about five years old—much older than the infants he was expecting. "And it hit me like a bolt of lightning," Williams said. "They're five years old! They would have been dead two years ago without the therapy we were working on, no question about it—absolutely none."

What it took—both in that case and in all the examples in this issue—was a new idea, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, it seems, that can be the best medicine.

—THE EDITORS

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