Boundaries are important. In health, meaningful boundaries protect personal health information, ensure patient and product safety, and, in many cases, they improve efficiencies and scalability, contribute to cost savings, and improve health outcomes. But over the next decade, many of these fixed boundaries may not serve people’s health needs. And long-held assumptions about hierarchy and authority have created misleading—even false—boundaries. Picking up on the work of Clayton Christensen, an innovation expert who argues that “false boundaries” constrain innovation, our research reveals that the most promising care, research, and finance models are emerging from the breaking or redrawing of boundaries we have constructed in health care. These five perspectives highlight how breaking false boundaries opens the door to morerelevant, effective, and compassionate care models:
- AUTOMATING SELF-CARE: shifting the boundaries between patients, clinicians, and machines
- CLOUD MEDICINE: lifting the boundary between biomedical and personal data
- MICROBIAL CARE: breaching the boundary between internal medicine and public health
- REENTRY HEALTH: redrawing the boundary between correctional and community health
- SURVIVORSHIP CARE CONTINUUM: lifting the boundary between cancer treatment and survivorship care