HBS 17th Annual Health Care Conference

Junzi Shi, MD

Resident in BWH Radiology Diagnostic

PGY-5

02/17/2020

The 17th Annual Health Care Conference at Harvard Business
School brings together students, industry and HBS Faculty. 

What are the next big trends in healthcare? Who is going to take care of the elderly? How does gender disparity limit our effectiveness? These are all questions that were discussed at the HBS annual healthcare conference. The conference was organized by HBS students in the Healthcare club. Attendees included HBS students, college students, along with some representatives from industry, and most of the speakers were HBS alumni and invited industry leaders.

The themes of the conference that struck me the most include Javier Rodriguez’s concept of the “healthcare amoeba.” Just like how a family may face decision quagmire when attempting to go out to dinner, healthcare has many components that tend to go in different directions. Like an amoeba, healthcare has components that are amorphous, ill-defined, with many different needs and desires. Moreover, every patient is unique and has different needs. So how do we address individual health better? The answer may lie in figuring out a better healthcare delivery model.

Disruptive healthcare is different from general parlance – it is being able to decentralize healthcare and still provide good or better care. Perhaps delivering care in the home, adapted to an individual’s needs, is arguably better than “one size fits all.” Is there a way to locally manage care, and then scale that to reach more patients? There are thoughtful questions that help us take the lessons learned from other industries such as the automotive infrastructure to rethink healthcare. Uber and Lyft have disrupted the taxi industry by decentralizing the service of giving rides, better addressing needs by utilizing smaller pockets of resources (using your own car) and better technology (an app to track the ride).

Another good model from industry is the airline industry that has been able to streamline quality control and safety that far outshines healthcare for decades. Perhaps what we need are “care traffic controllers” to help manage all the moving pieces in the large healthcare machinery. These are amongst the positive ideas that I took away, however there were also unsettling narratives.

Quite a few speakers spoke about physicians as if they were obstructive barriers to change as annoying weight: disruptive change led by millennials vs the entrenched privileged class. Lauren Lisher from Mount Sinai Health Partners spoke about finding the pain point in discussions with orthopedic surgeons developing a bundled care package in order to build common language, because “doctors don’t want to change.” The conversation was how do we get the doctors to come around, or alternatively, how to achieve our objective with...or without them. Start-ups look at population-wide health problems in innovative ways that physicians focused on the day-to-day work may be blind to. However, this does not mean that physicians do not want to change and incorporate new ideas if they help patient outcomes. Physicians need to be true partners in joint decision-making about healthcare innovation. I found the negative attitude towards physicians to be unfortunately a common theme at healthcare conferences, and this may guide business leaders to miss out on a huge opportunity to engage physicians as shareholders. If you are hoping to leader disruptive healthcare change, ask yourself, “Are business incentives actually aligned with patient care?” Physicians are the on-ground experts who actually do the work and we need to be both good stewards of our resources as well as gatekeepers to patient care.