The IT Transformation Health Care Needs

Reducing costs while improving care by Nikhil R. Sahni, Robert S. Huckman, Anuraag Chigurupati and David M. Cutler

From the Magazine (November–December 2017)

Getty Images/Hiroshi Watanabe

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In the mid-1990s, everyone knew that health care organizations across the United States were plagued by wasteful spending. The question for Intermountain Healthcare, which serves residents of Utah and Idaho, was where to start looking for savings internally. Data analyses quickly identified the most promising targets: 104 of the 1,440 clinical conditions that Intermountain treated accounted for 95% of the care it provided, and two services—newborn delivery and treatment of ischemic heart disease—accounted for 21% of its work.

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A version of this article appeared in the November–December 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Nikhil R. Sahni is a fellow at the Harvard economics department and a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Previously, he worked at the Health Policy Commission, an independent state agency in Massachusetts, and was senior director of strategy, planning, and operations at Kyruus, a health IT start-up.

Robert S. Huckman is the Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he is the Howard Cox Faculty Chair of the HBS Health Care Initiative and head of the Technology and Operations Management unit.

@robert_huckman

Anuraag Chigurupati works in operations at Devoted Health, a start-up health plan. Previously he served as a policy director at the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission and was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company.

David M. Cutler is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and author of Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America’s Health Care System, published by Oxford University Press. He served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council during the Clinton Administration and was the senior health care advisor to the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign.

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The IT Transformation Health Care Needs

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