Today, following yesterdays lashing out at Reggie, the next Harvard Prof who’s been teeing me off is Michael Porter (and his Virginia colleague Elizabeth Teisberg).

I’d been meaning to comment on Michael Porter’s latest piece in JAMA (not that I get to read it being too cheap to subscribe), but I did see the write-up in The Boston Globe and I have read the book he wrote with Elizabeth Teisbgerg. Now even if Teisberg was somehow unable to be interviewed about it after her PR agent initially hunted me down (She wasn’t concerned that she couldn’t defend her ideas, per chance? Elizabeth, my podcast offer is still open!), it has made many otherwise sensible people go gaga. Apparently Porter gets $100K a day for showing up for hospital consulting gigs and McKinsey did a straight copy and paste of his ideas for one of their articles recently (and it costs a lot more than $100K for them to show up!)

Now to be fair the first chapter of their book has the most thorough review of what’s wrong with American health care that I’ve ever seen. I’ve always assumed that if you are a big-shot Professor at Harvard or Virginia you get the best research assistants that graduate stipends can buy, and that chapter certainly proves me out.

But as I said three years ago when he was talking about it, Porter is quite correct to say that many improvements could be made in health care. The problem, he says, is that we’re competing about the wrong things. He wants to change all that by appealing to providers to do it better.

Most proposals to overhaul US healthcare systems — including
extending insurance to all Americans — address the "margins" of the
problem, Porter said. Doctors, he added, must lead the effort to help
create "a system where everyone is rewarded for value." For
example, a patient undergoing treatment for breast cancer typically has
to make repeat appointments with different doctors and specialists on
different days. Under his model, Porter said, the same patient should
be able to walk into one building and meet various specialists on the
same day, and those specialists should immediately consult with one
another.Then, he said, the hospital should closely follow its
cases, tracking survival rates, recovery times, and patient
satisfaction, among other things.

Well this is brilliant new thinking. OK, so Codman came up with that last part about tracking quality measures over 90 years ago, and some other guy has been harping on about it for a while too. But now Porter’s on the case it’s bound to happen, and even though Codman’s grave and Berwick’s shop are a short cab ride away, why expect him not to reinvent that wheel? After all he’s not the innovator guy (more on Christensen coming later on THCB).

Unfortunately the same thing is true for that team approach centered around the patient. Kaiser Permanente has been talking about it (and possibly even doing it) for years. Even Bernie Salick was doing something like that in his cancer centers by attempting to build all the activity around the patients’ need. And they are by no means the only examples. But that was back in the 1980s. Obviously because Michael Porter brings this up now it’s a great new idea.

Or just maybe there’s another reason why this approach hasn’t happened. Perhaps, no one’s been prepared to use the power of money to enforce it on the medical establishment.

Because if you do use the power of money, they will respond in a highly market-driven fashion. And there’s a great example of this response in the very same issue of JAMA in which Porter’s words of wisdom are printed. Over at The Doctor Weighs In, Pat Salber gives an excellent explanation of the case in point which is is the rash of one-stop heart hospitals that opened in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

These seem to be the incarnation of what Porter and (lord save us) Reggie Herzlinger are talking about. Dedicated one-stop consumer friendly, high efficiency focused-factories that treat only one disease very well, and give a complete ranges of services centered around that consumer. But of course one minor, teeny issue, is that heart procedures are still more or less paid for an a fee-per-episode basis.

So what does the data tell us? You know the answer, but let me have Pat Salber tell you anyway:

Of course, it is possible that new specialty hospitals would just
compete with existing facilities in general hospitals, taking volume
from them, but keeping the overall rates of services the same. But that
doesn’t appear to be what happens when one of these cardiac specialty
hospitals opens in a community. Instead, the JAMA study documents that
there is an incremental increase in the number of coronary
revascularization procedures performed after a specialty heart hospital
opens. Capacity increases and more people get these procedures.

So unless we change the incentives behind the system, any new fangled way of doing things (team work, new dedicated focused-factories patient-friendly clinics, etc, etc) will be used by the system to provide more stuff to the same number of people and to charge more overall money.

The team work, the new processes, the new procedures, etc, all that good stuff Porter (and the rest of us) want to see more of will emerge as a result of incentives. Right now there aren’t really any incentives to provide care in a cost-effective and patient friendly way, which is why the outliers that Michael Porter wants everyone else to turn into are just that–outliers.

None of this stuff has any relevance to mainstream provider groups which essentially face economic suicide if they adopt any of his more extreme approaches–such as specializing in only one type of condition and competing nationally versus locally. What’s even more worrying is that that seems to be exactly what McKinsey is recommending.

Instead we currently have a market which is the result of a set of incentives that encourages more to be done. More to be done, it must be noted, in the absence of any evidence that more needs to be done, but in a market where cardiologists have a strong demand for second homes and newer Porsches. Hence the current mess with specialty heart hospitals. (And imaging centers, overuse of chemo drugs community oncologists, spine surgeons doing too many fusions, etc, etc… the list goes on).

What we need is to change the incentive system so that somebody (consumers, their agents, the government, someone) gets to make a rational choice about the right level to pay per unit of care as compared to other ways to get value from that marginal dollar. And the "unit" should be not the cost of a single procedure, nor a bundle of services for particular illnesses, but the average cost of care for a population over time. If there was real competition over dollars between agents/plans/aggregators/integrated systems (call them what you like) to provide the best answer to that conundrum — and people could walk with their attached dollars, vouchers, whatever, to the competition if they were doing it better — then you would see all the innovations, team work and Kaizen processes that you want.

That’s how it works in other markets. But those other markets don’t have the complication of third-party coverage which is essential to spread costs of the huge disparity in needs for care.

But that’s not where the health care market is now, and we’re a damn long way from it going there, and instead the money is flowing in the wrong place for the wrong things–as Porter points out. Getting there of course requires a political change because it requires fundamentally changing the entire insurance system, moving to universal coverage, instituting a visible or hidden set of subsidies, and doing a raft of other stuff that Alain Enthoven and others have been calling for since 1975 (or before). And they know how difficult that is.

According to Porter "Most proposals to overhaul US healthcare systems — including
extending insurance to all Americans — address the "margins" of the
problem". How is that the "margins of the problem". It IS the damn problem and if it were sorted out all the things Porter’s talking about would more or less take care of themselves. 

I guess being a mere business school professor Porter just doesn’t have the economics background to understand why incentives matter so much in health care. On the other hand, if he can become millionaire from a mere 10 days work consulting in the field, then perhaps he does?