Since the 1990s, the cost of medical care has seen the greatest rate of inflation across all sectors, suppressing wages and limiting economic growth. The system is an enormously complicated technical approach to a complex problem. But complicated is not complex, and only complexity can manage complexity; working harder at the old paradigm won’t yield a different outcome. It doesn’t need to be this way.
Read MoreHealthcare has borrowed “best practice” management paradigms from manufacturing and skillfully applied them to most of healthcare’s parts, yet overall, it continues as the largest category of inflation. The mismatch? Healthcare’s real-world is a biologically and socially complex adaptive system and how it works is vastly different than the factory floor. The result? Demoralized front-line practitioners facing constraints and mountainous layers of complicatedness that create cost, not affordable care. A new approach based on systems principles can help heal healthcare’s wicked problem.
Read MoreThe internet is an example of the power of embracing complexity. Healthcare is in a similar position to the computer industry in the late 1980s and can learn important lessons that will dramatically improve quality and cost.
Read More
