Health care reform: an incentive for needed “disruptive” innovation

The fate of the Affordable Care Act will be taken up by the Supreme Court of the United States. If the court rules against challenges to the health reform effort, its success will be determined in clinics, hospitals and health plans in the years to come.

Vineeta Vijayaraghava and Clayton Christensen of the Innosight Institute, a think tank focused on disruptive innovation, say the efforts are spurring welcome innovation.

Among the promising efforts that have come since the act was passed in 2009, are these approved in October:

• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) authorized a Minnesota Medicare plan to cover care provided by an online convenience care clinic.
• The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced changes to hospital regulations to make it easier to use advance practice nurses and physician assistants instead of physicians. They scrapped certain safety and fire-code restrictions on dialysis centers and outpatient surgery centers that required costly equipment or structural changes. And they revised hospital restrictions that limited patients’ ability to take medications by themselves.

Read the commentary by Vijayaraghava and Christensen in The Washington Post.