Weekly Wisdom from Kauffman: How entrepreneurs can improve productivity and quality in healthcare

Posted by: Christina Hernandez Sherwood on March 21, 2013

With U.S. healthcare costs rising about 2.5 percent faster than inflation, there’s an urgent need to improve productivity and quality in American healthcare. A Kauffman Foundation report found that open access to medical data could help find that cost-benefit balance.

The report, “Valuing Health Care: Improving Productivity and Quality,” asked 31 experts to consider: How can the productivity and value of American health care be increased, in both the short-term and long-term? It offered some ideas for life science entrepreneurs eager to take on this complex and important problem.

The report included the following recommendations:

• Unleash the power of information by breaking down silos and encouraging data sharing between research centers, medical offices, pharmaceutical companies, insurance firms and others; and that a new corps of data entrepreneurs be incentivized to collect and analyze existing medical data to discover and then disseminate new therapies.
• Fund more translational, cross-cutting research, with larger average grants made available to larger teams, many of them with participants from multiple institutions; and requiring collaboration across research institutions.
• Empower patients by, among other means, providing unbiased information on treatment options' benefits and drawbacks, and helping them make choices about the relevant lifestyle implications and risk-reward tradeoffs.

Weekly Wisdom from Kauffman is a regular feature on eMed highlighting insightful research from the Kauffman Foundation. Do you have a favorite Kauffman research insight that could help life science entrepreneurs? Send it to mailto:emededitor@kauffman.org.

Category:  Kauffman Words of Wisdom  Tags:  wisdom, entrepreneurs, value, productivity, quality, healthcare