Moving From Operational Efficiency to Personalized Healthcare Value—IBM on Redefining Success in Healthcare

A health system that’s built to last: this is the latest sound-bite echoing through health policy circles. The theme of sustainability is permeating all matters of policy, from education and business to health care. Enter IBM, with a rigorous approach to Redefining Value and Success in Healthcare: Charting the path to the future, from the group’s Healthcare and Life Sciences thinkers.

What’s inspiring about this report is the team’s integrative thinking, bridging the relationship between operational effectiveness built on a robust information infrastructure that enables team-based care (the “collaboration” aspect in the middle of the pyramid), which then drive personalized healthcare value that is bolstered through preventive and wellness-focused care.

IBM points out that “the science of medicine has never been more advanced or capable than it is right now.” We are blessed on the technological supply-side of the healthcare equation. However, the challenges remain on the basic health services side of access — intervention for (some) individuals has been the result of a fragmented system-less health structure, “devaluing” (in IBM’s word) primary care and population health. Compared to all other industry sectors, economists rank health care as the least efficient industry in the world, according to an IBM survey of 480 economists conducted in 2010. Other inefficient industries cited were education and government, but healthcare wins the Inefficiency Contest. (Most efficient, BTW, were noted as communications and leisure/recreation/clothing segments)...