A decade ago, innovation in health care was about designing new products and services. From medical equipment creatively designed to be more durable and affordable to outreach efforts using the latest mobile tech, these offerings have saved lives and brought costs down. But as impactful as they’ve been, it is not a new product or service that will ignite lasting, systemic change in health care—it is reinventing the care model itself. And now, we have the opportunity to do just that.
The 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) drew public attention to the challenges and constraints of our existing systems of care and settled key uncertainties around delivery design and access to coverage and benefits. And, by requiring person-centered care and funding innovative experimentation, it also united and amplified other forces—demographics, cultural norms, and technological advancements—chipping away at legacy delivery systems and outdated coverage models. The ACA catalyzed a new landscape, one in which we can experiment, innovate, and radically reinvent new care models that restructure how talent, expertise, and resources like money, technology, and assets are organized.
This post-ACA decade offers unprecedented opportunities for leaders in health care to rethink assumptions, relinquish legacy practices, and combine promising experiments to remake health care at the system level. This map is your guide to leading in this new landscape. It maps the most promising models of today, explores the catalyzing forces that make them possible, and provides strategies for using these models to affect lasting and sustained change