The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

US healthcare is extraordinarily complex, and some very good strategists and analysts have badly missed the mark when they turn their skills to healthcare. These authors have clearly done their homework, and they bring their subject matter expertise of healthcare to Christenson's formidable strategic and analytic skills. The combination is breathtaking in its scope and clarity.

I have long since lost track of how many books and articles I have read, and how many conferences I have attended, over the past decade on the causes and proposed solutions for our healthcare mess. By the time I finished the introduction and Chapter 1 of The Innovator's Prescription, I recognized there is more truth and insight in those forty pages than in all of those books, articles, and conferences combined. The book presents an astonishing way of deconstructing and visualizing the fundamental business model problems- I have never seen it modeled this way before. Once Christenson demonstrates the similarities to other industries that have undergone disruptive innovation, the answer to our healthcare problem becomes obvious. Christenson's logical clarity in articulating the structural nature of the problem, accompanied by clear practical solutions for addressing them, makes this book a pleasure to read and serves as a call to action for those charged with making changes.

The biggest disadvantage to reading this book is that you may despair over the solutions being proposed to address the symptoms that do not address the underlying problem of faulty business models. On the other hand, after a decade of hand-wringing over the intractable nature of our healthcare problems, it is exciting to see that there really is a clear path to building an affordable, high-quality, consumer-friendly healthcare system. This book is truly a pleasure!