Disruptive innovation in healthcare hasn’t begun yet: Christensen

Clayton Christensen, as many of our readers know, pioneered a theory of disruption in business models and a three-step cycle of innovation (empowering, sustaining and efficiency, now quite broken indeed). With two other writers, he applied these theories to healthcare in the 2009 book ‘The Innovator’s Prescription’ which this Editor heard co-author Jason Hwang, MD present in 2009 at the Connected Health Symposium and at a private meeting in 2011. One would think that we’d be well into disruption, which is part of the empowering innovation cycle and which the authors championed in the book as underway.

The surprise at the end of this Mobihealthnews article on his recent presentation at “Better Health” in Boston, a McKesson-sponsored meeting series, was not what constitutes disruption, but that it has not really started yet, four years later. This will be much to the surprise of many successful and unsuccessful companies (Misfit ShineZocDoc, Zeo, 23andMe) and health plans which have stoutly touted their products and services as The True Disruptors. Sorry, you may be only a part of the Big Shift: decentralization. Decentralization will push out parts of healthcare off the hospital (more…)