Emergent Health Strategies:
Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage
A change is needed
Hardly anyone is satisfied with the current state of health care in the United States, not patients, not physicians, not nurses, not society in general. How did we get to this point? Why is it that patients travel to the United States for sophisticated heart surgery, and yet we have rampant childhood obesity? Why is our medical education system the most sought after in the world, and yet so many people lack primary care? Why do we spend so much of our GDP on health care, and yet have such little satisfaction with what we get?
The answers to these questions are not complicated, they are complex! What’s the difference, you ask? Let David Snowden, one of my mentors, explain it to you:
If video not visible click here
David asked me to be a Guest Blogger on his site: HERE is a link to a two week discussion on Complexity in Healthcare from Spring, 2010.
The nexus of Complexity, Organizational Culture and Medical Expertise
The development of a sustainable competitive advantage in health care demands a cooperation between individual providers and their unifying organization. Complexity Theory provides the dynamic framework. Organizational Culture creates the incentives and vehicles. Medical Expertise is developed though metacognition and intuition practiced in conjunction with organizational learning and transfer of both tacit and explicit knowledge. In order to succeed, all elements of this eclectic mix must come together.
We can show you how to do it.......
Health care isn’t complicated, it’s complex!
“It is more helpful to think like a farmer than an engineer or architect in designing a health care system. Engineers and architects need to design every detail of a system. This approach is possible because the responses of the component parts are mechanical and, therefore, predictable. In contrast, the farmer knows that he or she can do only so much. The farmer uses knowledge and evidence from past experience, and desires an optimum crop. However, in the end, the farmer simply creates the conditions under which a good crop is possible. The outcome is an emergent property of the natural system and cannot be predicted in detail.”
--Paul Plsek, Appendix B, “Crossing the Quality Chasm”
Russell S. Gonnering, MD, MMM, FACS, CPHQ
Consultant and Lecturer in Application of Complexity Theory for
Health Care Organizations
