How to “Fix” Healthcare in One Slide

Healthcare is defined by groupthink on staggering scale. 

You don’t need to see the PowerPoints. You don’t need to read the white papers. You don’t need to attend the ideas festivals, industry conferences and big media events to hear the same speakers saying the same thing the same way. The content and the concepts recycle themselves as a loop in time, a massive flywheel sustaining innovation starvation, sustaining perpetual “crisis” spanning generations and geographies, sustaining structural stalemate, sustaining the status quo, sustaining generic results. 

Most of the content sits at the extreme end of monotonous repetition -- it has no power to punch through or persuade, to grab attention and drive behavior change, to differentiate. It’s strategy by cliche.

Healthcare suffers from the "horseless carriage" syndrome. Lacking new concepts and new words to describe the first automobiles at the turn of the century, people described the future with language from the past.

For the most part, we’re either asking the wrong questions, or our questions are based on the wrong framework.

The capacity to ‘see, say, sell and sustain’ with system vision is a rich vein to mine for originality. No magic wands, hyperspace missions, moonshots to save humanity from itself, generative AI capabilities from technology vendors promoting access to galaxies far, far away. Just a different brand of imagination, the kind with the power to punch through and persuade. 

The thing to align are markets -- the commercial determinants of health -- in a way that a whole new economic system is born. It’s a strategy story born from a unique script, a screenplay like Reservoir Dogs that delivers in ‘innovation shock’ to the audience, something that sparks a whole new genre. And that story ends not with an economic concept born from the Industrial Age, but with different positioning, where the ‘production of affordable health’ is the organizing idea to drive large-scale system change.

“Cost” isn’t the problem.

/jgs

John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon Consulting. Blue Spoon is the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level.