Michael Porter on why he’s confident the U.S. can improve its healthcare system.

Topic: The Future of Health Care

Michael Porter: Well I could probably say the most about healthcare because that’s an area where I devoted approximately the last five or six years really intensively to try and understand the puzzle of healthcare.

In healthcare, I think we have every opportunity to truly transform the value equation in healthcare if we actually are able to go back and step back from the incremental changes to what we have today, and ask ourselves what would it take for us to create a dramatically higher value system.

I’ve written a lot about this lately and talk about it incessantly now.

Things like, just how you organize care; things like, how you measure success. These things sound very, very simple, but our best guess is that we can get double the value from the amount of money we’re spending today. Or we can get pretty much the same value for half the money we’re spending. That’s the order of magnitude and transformation, and I’m very optimistic about healthcare because I now see enough grassroots, bottom-up effort, and enough belief in the basic framework of that value as how we need to think. And the patient perspective is what we should care about.

I can see a line in sight to a healthcare system that we’ll be proud of, and it will lead the world, and it will be affordable.

Recorded on: June 11, 2007