Disruptive Healthcare

Disruptive Innovations to Health Care

Background

A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology there. Disruptive Technology is a term popularized by Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School and author of the book The Innovator's Dilemma. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper to produce, simpler, smaller, better performing, and, frequently, more convenient to use. (MIT World) The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market. (Wikipedia)

Christensen believes that the main reason that successful and apparently well-run and well established organizations loose market share, and sometimes go out of business, is that they fail to recognize the distinction between sustaining and disruptive technologies. As a result, they are blindsided as the technology matures and eventually are displaced by competitors. (Christensen)

Problem and Solution

Two major health care issues are affordability and accessibility. As an organization, there is a need to reduce costs and improve patient/consumer outcomes. A consumer is an individual and or organization that acquires’ a commodity (something of use or value) or service. (Dictionary.com) Most consumers that can afford health care acquire it as a subsidized benefit from their employer. In contrast, those who cannot afford it are either unemployed or their current employer does not provide this type of benefit. Convenient Accessibility is integrating the traditional medical community and providing all consumers with focused patient care...