Health Affairs

Editor’s Note: Today, The Health Affairs Blog begins a series of four posts on trends in performance measurement and performance-based payment in health care. The series focuses particularly on the increasing emphasis being placed on measuring and rewarding cost-efficiency. Today, James Robinson (below) and Tom Williams contribute posts. On Monday, Arnold Milstein and Howard Beckman weigh in. The... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Why have so few provider groups undertaken the self-analysis that the Virginia Mason Medical Center (VMMC) entered into through its use of the famed Toyota Production System, even before Aetna and large employers began to push VMMC to cut costs? This is just one question posed by James C. Robinson, Berkeley economist and... Read the rest of this entry »

Biotechnology firms constitute a subsector of the larger pharmaceutical industry (“drug companies with needles,” we call them), but to date have been spared from the blood sport of American health punditry, pharma-bashing. While drug firms routinely are castigated for their sins, real and imagined, biotech firms have been appreciated as innovative and entrepreneurial startups (rather... Read the rest of this entry »

The biotechnology industry has grounds for complaint. The research pipeline is disgorging breathtaking new treatments for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and other once-intractable diseases. But instead of praise, or in addition to praise, the industry finds itself subjected to ever-louder criticism of its prices and earnings. America again seems to demand the best health... Read the rest of this entry »

Redefining Health Care is a tour de force, a magisterial analysis, and a long-overdue application to the health sector of core principles of business strategy. It’s also a bit of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Porter and Teisberg don’t like capitation, vertical integration, integrated physician-hospital organization, multispecialty group practice, or any of the other epiphenomena... Read the rest of this entry »