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Focuses on Pennzoil's motor oil business. Designed to address the business strategy issues of how a firm chooses its scope to create competitive advantage in its core business. "Scope" can be broadly defined to include vertical scope (forward and backward integration), horizontal scope (multiple rel... More

The uncertainty and complexity of most business environments make successful management a difficult art. Frequently, bright, experienced, well-educated people manage their companies into strategic distress. Many of these bad results are not simply a matter of bad luck. This note discusses problems c... More

Providers, including hospitals, clinics, physician groups, and individual physicians, are the central actors in the health care system and the place where most value is actually delivered. Ultimately, it is how medicine is practiced, and the way patients are cared for, that will determine the succes... More

Health plans have a unique and essential role in value-based competition in health care, as some forward-looking plans are beginning to demonstrate. Most health plans, however, are not living up to this potential. Instead, many have acted in ways that reinforced zero-sum competition and failed to de... More

Suppliers, consumers, and employers have an important role in catalyzing and supporting value-based competition in health care. By moving to value-based thinking themselves, these parties will benefit while speeding systemic transformation. There is no need to wait for regulatory reform or for other... More

Government has a major influence on the health care system in the U.S. State and federal policy makers set numerous rules and regulations that affect the nature of competition in health care, as well as incentives and constraints for system participants. Health care policy has been both a reflection... More

Health care is on a collision course with patient needs and economic reality. Without significant changes, the scale of the problem will only get worse. Rising costs, mounting evidence of quality problems, and increasing numbers of Americans without insurance are unacceptable and unsustainable. The ... More

Value-based competition requires a transformation of health care delivery. To help make the ideas of value-based competition concrete and operational, the authors introduce the care delivery value chain (CDVC). The CDVC offers a systematic framework to delineate and analyze the process of care deliv... More

The fundamental problem in the U.S. health care system is that the structure of health care delivery is broken. This is what all the data about rising costs and alarming quality tell us. And the structure of health care delivery is broken because competition is broken. All of the well-intended refor... More

The U.S. health care system is on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors, and limited access to care. This chapter presents a wide array of indicators that document the range of problems confronting the system. While individual measures can be quest... More

It seems obvious that health care value is created in addressing medical conditions for individual patients over the cycle of care, and that health care competition should be centered at this level. So why, despite so much effort by so many well-intentioned people, has competition gravitated to zero... More

The problems of the U.S. health care system are not the result of inattention. Well-intended reformers have long recognized that the system has been badly broken. However, reform efforts have failed because the diagnosis of the problem was wrong. The absence of value-based competition on results has... More

The zero-sum competition of the 1990s and early 2000s in the U.S. health care system has clearly failed. It did not produce widespread improvements in the quality and cost of delivering care, nor widen access to care for all Americans. Instead, zero-sum competition perpetuated inefficiency and subst... More

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The Cleveland Clinic's health care services are internationally renowned for quality. In 2008, The Clinic began to restructure the organization into teams defined around patient needs, rather than traditional medical specialties."Patients First! takes shape as the teams measure and report outcomes, ... More

The Cleveland Clinic's health care services are internationally renowned for quality. In 2008, The Clinic began to restructure the organization into teams defined around patient needs, rather than traditional medical specialties."Patients First! takes shape as the teams measure and report outcomes, ... More

The Cleveland Clinic's health care services are internationally renowned for quality. In 2008, The Clinic began to restructure the organization into teams defined around patient needs, rather than traditional medical specialties."Patients First! takes shape as the teams measure and report outcomes, ... More

The U.S. health care system is in crisis. At stake are the quality of care for millions of Americans and the financial well-being of individuals and employers squeezed by skyrocketing premiums-not to mention the stability of state and federal government budgets.In Redefining Health Care, internation... More

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How can management cure health care’s ills? This digital collection, curated by Harvard Business Review, includes the ideas and best practices for transforming health care.... More