‘Reverse Innovation in Health Care: How to Make Value-Based Delivery Work’ a new book by two leading American professors, Vijay Govindarajan and Ravi Ramamurti will be launched on 10^th July 2018. The book unravels the issues global healthcare industry grapples with, and highlights some of their learning from successful business models in India in the quest for high-quality, low-cost care for all. As part of the journey, the authors spoke to over two dozen hospitals and interviewed more than 125 executives both in India and the United States. The book divulges how the innovations developed by some Indian exemplars are already being practiced by some far-sighted US providers, reversing the typical flow of innovation in the world. The model on which Narayana Health has been created and successfully implemented to make quality healthcare affordable to the masses is being considered my many in the US as a possible solution.

Author Vijay Govindarajan said, ‘India has been inspiring the world with many innovative initiatives in the recent past including affordable healthcare. Bangalore headquartered hospital chain Narayana Health is a great example in offering affordable solution, with results that were impressive to Western observers. In doing so, Dr. Devi Shetty fulfilled his high-minded purpose and also built a very profitable company. From the beginning, even the most expensive surgical at Narayana hospitals were priced 20%-40% less than the same offerings at any other private Indian hospitals. He did not do this by cutting cost but by being an innovator; he simply did it by stepping over traditional boundaries and painting outside the lines.

 

One prominent and successful case is Health City Cayman Islands. Ascension (the nation’s largest non-profit health system and the largest Catholic health system in the world) in their quest to bring innovative, high-quality, low-cost tertiary healthcare services to the Cayman Islands partnered with Narayana Health and the Cayman government in 2012. The result was Health City Cayman Islands (HCCI), a 104-bed tertiary care hospital on Grand Cayman. After working closely for nearly four years with leaders from Narayana and the government in an innovative public-private partnership to build the strengths and capabilities of HCCI, the hospital is now achieving its vision. ’ added Author Ravi Ramamurti.

 

The book reveals four pathways being used by health-care organizations in the United States to apply Indian-style principles to attack the exorbitant costs, uneven quality, and incomplete access to health care. With rich stories and detailed accounts of medical professionals who are putting these ideas into practice, this book shows how value-based delivery can be made to work in the United States. It elaborates “bottom-up” change doesn’t require a grand plan out of Washington, DC, agreement between entrenched political parties, or coordination among all players in the health-care system. It needs entrepreneurs with innovative ideas about delivering value to patients. Reverse innovation has worked in other industries. We need it now in health care.

Author profiles

Vijay Govindarajan (VG) is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation. VG is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School. The Coxe Distinguished Professorship is a Dartmouth-wide faculty chair. He was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric. He worked with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt to write “How GE is Disrupting Itself”, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that pioneered the concept of reverse innovation – any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. HBR picked reverse innovation as one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century. VG is a NYT and WSJ Best Selling author and a two-time winner of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the best article published in HBR. In the latest Thinkers 50 Rankings, Govindarajan is rated the #1 Indian Management Thinker. Prior to joining the faculty at Tuck, VG was on the faculties of Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau) and the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad, India).

Ravi Ramamurti

Ravi Ramamurti is an expert on strategy and innovation in emerging markets. At Northeastern U., he holds the title of University Distinguished Professor, which is the highest honor bestowed on faculty members. Earlier he was the D’Amore-McKim School of Business Distinguished Professor of International Business & Strategy. He founded and heads the university’s Center for Emerging Markets. For over 35 years, he has studied the strategies of firms in and from emerging markets. Ravi has been a visiting professor at Harvard Business School in the Business-Government-and-International-Economy area, at the Wharton School (U. of Pennsylvania), and at MIT-Sloan School. He has also been a visiting professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, CEIBS Shanghai, and IMD-Switzerland. He is a six-time winner of the ADL Prize for Professor of the Year based on his teaching.