Recently I was privileged to be part of a consultation bringing together CEOS in health, academia and business to examine health care's innovation education. Regina Herzlinger and co authors have distilled these consultations into this thought provoking article. https://hbr.org/2014/11/bridging-health-cares-innovation-education-gap

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EDUCATION
Bridging Health Care’s Innovation-Education Gap
by Regina Herzlinger, Vasant Kumar Ramaswamy, and Kevin A. Schulman
NOVEMBER 11, 2014
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Despite the excellence of its delivery, insurance, and technology components, the health care sector in the United States is plagued with sky-high
costs, unequal access, and erratic quality. This predicament continues to create a major drag on the U.S. economy.
According to an analysis by McKinsey, while the productivity of the U.S. computer and semiconductor industry grew by 7.6% per year in the 1990-
2007 period, the productivity of the U.S. health care industry dropped by 0.8% annually. To change this grim statistic, the pace of innovation must
dramatically increase. But to achieve that, we must alter how we educate future health care leaders. Despite the health care sector’s massive share
of America’s GDP, most graduate health care administration and MD/MBA programs have not aligned their curricula to address the need for
innovation.
In our interviews with 58 CEOs in the health care sector about their organizations’ future needs, the words they most used
were change and innovation. (The 58 included leaders of delivery, insurance, med tech, biopharma, and IT organizations and ministers of health.)
They wanted people who can investigate problems, find solutions through process and organizational innovation, and drive them forward — people
who can work on a diverse team, understand failure and its causes, and manage change.
But our analysis of health-care-related curricula at 26 top U.S. schools that offer graduate degrees in health care administration found the most
frequently used words were policy and organization. Innovation and entrepreneur were used only 27 times.
At far too many programs, curricula focus on isolated subjects — such as health policy, analytics, quantitative problem solving — that are taught
primarily through lectures in theoretical settings. Despite the excellence of the individual faculties, programs, and schools, this siloed, abstract
approach does not meet the needs of future innovators. Many CEOs have been so dissatisfied with traditional education for health care
administrators that they have had their organizations develop training programs of their own.
Our surveys indicated that many academics in the field of health care administration agree that schools are not educating students to be able to
create badly needed new processes, systems, and organizational forms and to solve problems and implement solutions across a range of business
processes.
Separate analyses of medical school curricula reached similar conclusions: A Lancet article, for example, called for global change to promote
transformative professional education that harnesses flows of educational content and innovation.
The CEOs we interviewed do not believe that academia alone should
shoulder the burden of fixing this problem. We agree. Business leaders
can and should partner with educators to accelerate this improvement in
pedagogical techniques by pursuing these transformative activities:
Team teaching. The CEOs want to provide input on program design and
teaching, and many would be willing to guest-lecture or co-teach. If a
faculty member lacks the relevant real-world experience, the remedy is to
have him or her team up with an entrepreneur, a strategist, or an innovator to teach and help solve local and global practical problems. In an MBA
course Innovating in Health Care that one of us (Regina) teaches at Harvard Business School (HBS), for example, two health-care-reimbursement
specialists participate in a session to assist students in developing business plans. As a result of one plan (developed by a team of Harvard MBA and
School of Public Health students), a large U.S. health insurance company will reimburse on-demand jet service for kidney transplantation.
Mentoring. Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneur in Residence program is an example of an organized campus activity that brings health care
innovators in contact with students. Entrepreneurs-in-residence serve for the entire academic year in a part-time capacity, meeting with students in
group and one-on-one sessions and collaborating with various faculty members on cases, courses, research, and other activities.
Case studies. Case studies of successes and failures (especially failures) are essential. Business leaders could partner with academics to develop
them and appear in classes when they are taught. (The CEOs of a number of health care companies from around the world lectured in the HBS
course Innovating in Health Care when cases on their organizations were taught. They included Amil, Fortis Healthcare, McKesson, PAREXEL
International, and the Vitality Group.)
Field projects and apprenticeships. The CEOs feel that field work and formal internships can offer lessons the classroom cannot. Formal
residencies, apprenticeships, or field-study courses that place the student in a health care environment will help inform future innovators about the
real-world challenges facing health care systems in the 21 st
century and the difficulties likely to be encountered in implementing solutions. Five
new health care businesses resulted from the field studies in the 2013 Innovating in Health Care course, including an ambulatory pediatric surgery
center for Medicaid recipients and a hospital in Nigeria.
Rewards and incentives. While traditional classroom, online, and blended courses may remain mainstays of health care education, the future
challenge will be to integrate the classroom into the real world. To achieve this, current faculty incentives, which are often focused primarily on
research and publications, should be strengthened to recognize excellence in teaching and reforming the curriculum.
Accreditation and standards. Accreditation programs for U.S. medical and health administration schools lack specific requirements for core
competencies related to innovation. Similarly, courses for the maintenance of a medical license have no specific emphasis on innovation. Ranking
of educational programs by third parties and other formal and informal governance processes also do not stress innovation. To address these
deficiencies, the business community should collaborate with accreditation, licensure, and ranking programs to create innovation standards. In
addition, it should consider working with schools’ admissions programs to offer student loans and other incentives for students who demonstrate
interest and competence in becoming innovators.
These activities require greater commitment by business — a shift from trying to alleviate the symptoms of an anachronistic educational system
toward a partnership that can help improve global health care systems in a lasting and meaningful way. To encourage this partnership, a group
representing global academic institutions, professional organizations, and health care consultancies formed the Global Educators Network for
Health Care Innovation Education (GENIE) Group.
The goal of the organization, which includes us, is to make innovation a central part of the education of future leaders in health care. To advance it,
we have already held two annual conferences with 150 global academic and stakeholder attendees at Harvard Business School and Duke University,
launched the Harvard edX program Innovating in Health Care and the HBS Executive Education course Business Innovations in Global Health
Care, created an archive of innovative programs, and surveyed a wide range of constituents to help develop the competencies they deemed
necessary in an innovation curriculum.
With activities like these, we aim to encourage business leaders and academics to create health care administration education more focused on
innovation.

2. innovation.
Health-care-administration education is at a crossroads similar to one that business schools were at in the late 1970s, when courses that
emphasized entrepreneurship were almost non-existent. To change this, business schools developed a network of entrepreneurs who partnered
with faculty to guest lecture, develop case studies, and provide intellectual, financial, and moral support. (See Shaping the Waves: A History of
Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School.) Entrepreneurship is now a vital component of almost all business administration programs and has
played an important role in the U.S. economy.
That success demonstrates that academics and business leaders can join forces once again to transform the way that future health care leaders are
educated. By working together to integrate the classroom into the real world, they can help schools produce the innovators that health care
organizations deeply need.
Related Videos and Other Resources: For more information on this topic, watch Professor Herzlinger explain the need for innovation and how to make
it happen in health-care-administration education; hear from some of the leading global health care CEOs and academics who support innovation in
health care; and see some of the innovative ventures in health care started by students. The CEO champions of this movement can be found here. The
academic supporters of this movement are listed on the GENiE website. Finally, this video is the introduction to the MOOC version of Innovating in
Health Care.
Regina Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
Vasant Kumar Ramaswamy is founder and CEO of Scriplogix, a health care market-research and information-services company, and a former economist at the World
Bank.
Kevin A. Schulman, M.D., MBA, is a professor of medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine and a professor of business administration at Duke University’s Fuqua
School of Business. He also holds appointments at the Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care in the Durham VA Medical Center, the Duke Center for Clinical Health Policy
Research, and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine.
This article is about EDUCATION
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Related Topics: HEALTH | INNOVATION
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11 COMMENTS
Sergio Stagnaro 2 days ago
As a Clinician,i.e., who is taking part in a exstinguishing class, I think that to bridge the gap between rising costs in Health Care which depletes, we have to consider a
simple. frequent clinical case. An old, 74-aged patient complains of sudden epigastric pain, nausea, vomiting, impaired balance, view alteration, dizzines. The doctors who
are not up-dated in physical Semeiotics send immediately such a pazient to Emergency Room. On the contrary, up-dated physicians are able to recognized with a
stehoscope Brain X Synfrome brought about by u virus: http://www.nexusacademicpublishers.com/table_contents_detail/2/44. Do you understand what I mean?
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