Innovation

• 21st Century Education Requires Lifewide Learning

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining educational innovation and technology, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. I have decided to spend the remainder of my career helping to replace industrial era schooling with educational structures better suited to our 21st century, global, innovation-based economy. This sweeping goal of total educational transformation may seem overly ambitious for someone whose work centers in learning technologies. However, in... More »
  

• Helping Patients Make Peace with Death

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. No one wants to think about the stuff I do — death, suffering, pain, heartache, grief, sorrow. Individual reluctance is mirrored in the health care system's belief that more care and technology can stave off death, and that what we don't talk about won't happen. And often that strategy... More »
  

• How Mobile Phones Can Transform Healthcare

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. The mobile phone is a strong contender as a key transforming agent in the future of health and healthcare. There are now more than 5.3 billion cell phone users around the globe, and 90 percent of the world's population is covered by a commercial wireless signal. We now have... More »
  

• Health Reform Lessons from Mexico

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. Health systems are at a crossroads. Throughout the world, countries at all levels of economic development and with all types of political systems have embarked in a creative search for the elusive goal of universal coverage. From Chile, China, and Ghana to the USA, India, and Rwanda, novel ways... More »
  

• Radically Rethinking Health Care Delivery

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. When I first suggested to a team of health care clinicians that their work needed to be radically redesigned, I was told that the word "radical" was reserved for only the most serious of medical procedures and I had no license to use the word — after all, I... More »
  

• A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. The challenge that we face — making health care affordable and conveniently accessible to most people — is not unique to health care. Almost every industry began with services and products that were so complicated and expensive to provide that only people with a lot of skill and a... More »
  

• Searching for Health Care's Entrepreneurial Spirit
  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. At first blush, it would appear that entrepreneurship is alive and well in health care. And that's true in many areas: New devices, pharmaceuticals, and surgical techniques regularly get developed and incorporated into practice. Virtually every day, there is information about a clinical study with a new way to... More »
  

• Vaccine Literacy, a Crucial Healthcare Innovation

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. As we face the challenges of advancing "Healthcare and Innovation" at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, advocating for further diffusion of cost-effective and proven heath benefits of vaccination improves quality and access, and is a key to preventing disease. While vaccines (initially discovered in 1792) now enter their fourth... More »
  

• 21st Century Medicine, 19th Century Practices
  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. By the time I saw Mr. Johnson (not his real name), he had received three CT scans in less than 24 hours — and we had done nothing to make him feel better or cure his clinical problem. The day prior, he had seen his primary care physician in... More »
  

• The Case for Innovation in Health Care

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. Health is defined by the World Health Organization as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity...The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race,... More »
  

• Leadership That Longfellow Would Appreciate

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. In a famous scene in 1875, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow returned to Bowdoin College with his classmates to celebrate their 50th reunion. Many had died, but through verse, Longfellow challenged those remaining to think how much they could still do: "For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though... More »
  

• The Traits of Advanced Leaders

  Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. Welcome to the dawning era of social innovation, in which more people aspire to tackle old problems in new ways with new tools. Lacking confidence in established organizations and governments to do the trick, innovators think that it's time to reinvent institutions to make progress on social issues such... More »
  

• Why Innovation Is So Hard in Health Care - and How to Do It Anyway

  Editor's note: This post is the first in a three-week series examining innovation in health care, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. Supposedly, everyone working in health care wants the same thing: to help people get and stay healthy. "Everyone" includes primary care doctors, medical specialists, nurses, hospital administrators, health insurance providers, nutritionists, pharmaceutical companies, medical technology manufacturers, fitness gurus, paraprofessionals, public health commissioners, and charities dedicated to a disease... More »
  
  (Ref. from  - http://blogs.hbr.org/innovations-in-health-care/)