I’ve been really interested in something Jay Walker, curator and chairman of TEDMED, told me at Xerox Healthcare event at CHIME. I’m not exactly sure how we got into the conversation, but Jay made the comment that “big companies never disrupt themselves.”
I’d love to have had a chance to dive in more to what Jay Walker was really thinking on this subject. No doubt I could tell he’d given it a lot of thought. However, the concept is incredibly intriguing to me and the more I dig into it I realize that Jay is really on to something.
There are so many reasons why a big organization won’t or can’t disrupt itself. This isn’t to say that big companies aren’t without their value. It turns out that large organizations are really really good at optimizing existing business, services and processes. They can squeeze the value out of a current business like no other. However, optimizing your current business is very different than disrupting your business and changing a market. There are just too many incentives for a large healthcare organization to not disrupt themselves.
When it comes to healthcare IT, I think we will see this same concept play out as well. We can look to the large healthcare IT organizations to see how something is going to be optimized, but we shouldn’t expect any sort of disruptive innovation to come from these larger healthcare IT companies. They have so many reasons not to disrupt themselves.
I give Jonathan Bush, CEO of athenahealth, a lot of credit when it comes to understanding this. He literally built a program at athenahealth that he calls “More Disruption Please.” My take on it is that Jonathan Bush wanted a way to spend a bunch of money on things that could disrupt the athenahealth business. This program would allow him to do just that without having to explain that spend to the public markets. When they ask why he spend millions of dollars on these disruptive companies, he can just say “That’s what I told you I was going to do. It’s called More Disruption Please for a reason!” I think it’s pure genius.
Although, even this effort which I call genius really just highlights that the disruption to healthcare is likely going to come from outside large companies. If anything, this program is a way for athenahealth to tap into that disruption so that they’re well positioned to ride that wave of disruption which will surely come.
What disruptions do you see coming to healthcare? And if you tell me it’s coming from a big company, I’ll take a look, but now you’ll know I’m skeptical. Although, I’m certainly happy to be proven wrong.
