The article documents the central role that his Mormon faith has played throughout Christensen’s life, but especially as he faced and overcame three of the deadliest diseases – heart attack, cancer and stroke – over the last three years.  In addition, it also provides a window into Christensen’s insights into the US healthcare industry, obtained as both a patient and as researcher/author of The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care.  In “The Innovator’s Prescription, Christensen and his co-authors apply the principles of his well developed theory of disruptive innovation to the US healthcare delivery system.  Not surprisingly, he disagrees 100% with the Obamacare approach.  Instead, Christensen and his two colleagues (both doctors and Democrats, by the way), found (again, not surprisingly):

…that the fee-for-service reimbursement system, in which providers earn more by treating patients more aggressively, impedes the kind of disruptive innovation that would lead to better care at a lower cost. There are several systems we could adopt that would be better, but there isn’t a road map to get there. The business models of health are frozen in the hospital and the doctor’s office. The path to fixing the system is to disrupt those models. Here are some approaches:

Routinization. A hospital is really three business models under one roof, each of which manages a different type of medical practice. Intuitive medicine is the realm of highly trained specialists handling difficult diagnoses and treatment. Empirical medicine is the costly realm of chronic care and trial-and-error treatment. Precision medicine, the real goal for the system, is a case where diagnosis is known and so is the therapy. Then treatment can be routinized and moved off-site. Disruption will involve pushing more of medicine into the precision category, then automating that care to make it better and cheaper.

Consolidation. The best way to unleash disruption is if more health care providers combine, controlling hospitals, doctors and health insurance. Christensen makes an analogy to RCA in the 1950s. To get people to watch the first color programming on its NBC channel, RCA also had to manufacture color TV sets. A hospital loses money if it tells patients to go to an outside cheaper clinic. But if it owns the health plan and the clinic, disruptive ideas will flourish.

Precision. The kind of targeted therapies now used in cancer treatment, such as the drug Christensen received, will be applied more widely. Diseases will be subtyped more specifically and therapies tailored to work better. This will also save time and money as clinical drug trials become more focused. Specialty clinics will arise to implant devices more cheaply.

Do-it-yourself. Christensen predicts a rise in self-diagnosis and self-care, as tools that used to be stuck in the hospital reach patients and their families.

I had the good fortune of seeing Christensen speak in person twice at George Gilder’s Telecosm conferences and once at BellSouth, when he spoke at the annual executive management retreat. His presentations were compelling, yet entertaining. Interestingly, Christensen conducted the basic research that underlies all his books and thinking on innovation by studying an industry where failure was endemic – disk drive manufacturing. A friend had suggested it because it resembled the business equivalent of fruit flies, which were the most commonly studied species by geneticists because their life cycle is so short (one day) that cause and effect across generations can be readily observed. Through that study, Christensen developed his theory of disruptive innovation, whereby new market entrants initially introduce new a product or service in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly move ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors. Bill Gates’ MS-DOS operating system, Job’s/Wozniak’s Apple computer, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon bookstore are a few of the many examples of disruptive innovation and market value creation that fit perfectly with Christensen’s theories of innovation.

We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are. Mrs. Pelosi and the White House are resorting to these abuses because their bill is so unpopular that a majority even of their own party doesn’t want to vote for it. Fence-sitting Members are being threatened with primary challengers, a withdrawal of union support and of course ostracism. Michigan’s Bart Stupak is being pounded nightly by MSNBC for the high crime of refusing to vote for a bill that he believes will subsidize insurance for abortions.

Democrats are, literally, consuming their own majority for the sake of imposing new taxes, regulations and entitlements that the public has roundly rejected but that they believe will be the crowning achievement of the welfare state. They are also leaving behind a procedural bloody trail that will fuel public fury and make such a vast change of law seem illegitimate to millions of Americans.

The concoction has become so toxic that even Mrs. Pelosi isn’t bothering to defend the merits anymore, saying instead last week that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Or rather, “deeming” to have passed it.