In December I visited Sao Paulo, Brazil. By all accounts, the state of Sao Paulo has the most advanced public health system in the country. Many of the people I met said that surrounding states had one healthcare strategy: buy an ambulance and take the sick to Sao Paulo.
While Sao Paulo operates a public health system, they also have private healthcare systems. I visited Albert Einstein Hospital (yes, originally funded by THE Albert Einstein). The private hospital system has the best doctors and equipment, has great facilities and is funded through serving private companies/payors - often foreign-based companies. The administrators there also help to run public hospitals.
In the public hospitals, administrators and hospital department heads showed us several things they'd done to improve the high volume of patients (emergency room has waiting on gurneys in hallways). They'd looked at the 'flow of patients' and optimized their movement through hospitals. They'd created remote radiology reading centers and worked to keep the equipment and infrastructure running at peak throughput.
I loved seeing how people will innovate to build greater efficiency in the system. Private companies can run imaging or other hospital departments, operate them in partnership with public hospitals and draw revenue based on volume targets with some measure of mix in quality. I saw many of the experiments doing quite well.
Beth Comstock often points out that the most powerful path to great innovation is to take a few meaningful steps forward, right now and iterate quickly to make things better. I think that's inspiring.
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