The good folks at Harvard Business School Publishing are getting into the field of audio conferences. They’ve bribed me with a free pass to their first one so long as I mentioned it to you, and that I’ve accepted gives you a clue about which HBS professor is not presenting. The one who is presenting is Michael Porter, luminary of the business competitive strategy field who has been massively successful and influential in that arena for decades, so much so that all my MBA friends can still recite his 7 Pillars of Wisdom Five Forces of Competition. For reasons that I’m sure will appear puzzling to him in several years and were probably due to excessive consumption of alcohol, Porter has decided to enter the quagmire known as health care.

Porter’s initial thrust is to suggest that healthcare is not competing on the right level. He says:

Competition in the health care system occurs at the wrong level, over the wrong things, in the wrong geographic markets, and at the wrong time. Competition has actually been all but eliminated just where and when it is most important.

To get this from the horse’s mouth, get your corporate credit card out and go sign up here for the webinar which is on Tuesday 28 September.

My biased read will be delivered sometime later. I suspect that given the new emphasis on P4P and DSM in Medicare, Porter’s thinking may become pretty influential in health care.