The cost of health care administration: ‘This is a solvable problem’

Other business sectors have solved administrative problems that persist in health care. It’s just a matter of finding those examples and applying them. Kevin Schulman, MD, MBA, is an internal medicine physician and professor of medicine at Stanford University, continues his explanation about precedents found in the public sector, private sector, and public-private partnerships.

Medical Economics: Applying precedents thinking to administrative burdens in U.S. health care: 82 business examples show it can be solved

Kevin Schulman, MD, MBA:And they just published on that in Harvard Business Review just this spring. But we were using that methodology for a year before that at the business school. And so we said, well, let's try it with administrative costs, and this fundamental notion that we have an analog process that was digitized, it wasn't a digital process, and we don't have this standardization across the market. And when we did that, we had a great, a brilliant student team that went out and found us 82 different firms and markets that have analyzed some or all of this problem or addressed some or all of this problem. Very few of them in health care, a lot of them in other industries, a lot in banking, for example. And then it's very easy to see that you could port those things back. She gets embarrassed when I say this, one of the students working on the project had been working on this issue, actually, with some consulting firms and some other researchers for a long time before she came to Stanford. And halfway through the project, said, oh, my God, this is a solvable problem. It's been solved through the public sector, through public-private partnerships and in the private sector.