The cost of health care administration: Finding solutions in other business sectors

What’s the best way to generate ideas to solve problems in business generally? In health care, specifically? Kevin Schulman, MD, MBA, an internal medicine physician and professor of medicine at Stanford University, explains why it is time to move beyond brainstorming with sticky notes to identify solutions to the administrative problems clogging the U.S. health care system.

Medical Economics: Applying precedents thinking to solve the problem of administrative costs and burdens in U.S. health care: an introduction

Kevin Schulman, MD, MBA:Some of my colleagues, Stefano Zenios and Ken Favaro over at the business school, have been working on this theory. Stanford's a lot about innovation, and our design school is about need-based innovation. It's an amazing kind of concept. You know, companies like DoorDash came out of this process. But the process is go very deep to make sure you understand what the need is before you build a solution. And generally, the need based finding is really robust, but the solutioning is, go in a room with a bunch of really brilliant people and put little yellow sticky notes on the wall to see if you get an idea that might work. And Ken and Stefanos were not satisfied with that, and they said, it's really hard to invest a lot of money in a sticky note, but for really large changes, like the one that we're talking about, there have to be better ways of doing this. And so precedents thinking takes design thinking to another level and says every business problem in the world has been solved by somebody somewhere. And if you could articulate a problem, you can actually develop a solution. You know, you can see whether you can identify their solutions and see whether that you can bring them back to your problem.