Aspiring healthcare entrepreneurs could be forgiven for assuming our most significant challenge is the need to reduce the cost of care. Investors and policy wonks alike seem to agree on the overriding need to focus on innovations that will improve efficiency and take costs out of the system.
The appeal of this approach is easy to understand: rising healthcare costs are a real problem, and business process improvement feels like something we already know how to do. Large companies like GE and Oracle ORCL -0.83% are thrilled by the opportunity to apply their process methodologies to healthcare. Management journals love the idea of improving healthcare through operational excellence. An increasing number of foundations have also joined the fray, focused explicitly on supporting innovations that reduce the cost of care.
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