Completely missing from the health care debate is a conversation about health care innovation and productivity. But not only are these legitimate factors — they are the most important factors.
Look around the world, however, and see the crucial advances being made.
“Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That’s what we’re doing in health care,” Dr. Shetty says. “What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation.”
At his flagship, 1,000-bed Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, surgeons operate at a capacity virtually unheard of in the U.S., where the average hospital has 160 beds, according to the American Hospital Association.
Narayana’s 42 cardiac surgeons performed 3,174 cardiac bypass surgeries in 2008, more than double the 1,367 the Cleveland Clinic, a U.S. leader, did in the same year. His surgeons operated on 2,777 pediatric patients, more than double the 1,026 surgeries performed at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Before we turn the whole U.S. system into a larger, more rigid and stagnant, less entrepreneurial, more costly version of Medicare, one that “bends the cost curve” up instead of down, shouldn’t we give at least a few minutes consideration to the real solution to our health care problem: technological, process, and business model innovation?
