Disruptive collaboration: a thesis for pro-competitive collaboration in health care

Abstract

There are strong arguments for more competition in health care to drive significant improvements in the U.S. system. These arguments are sound, as a general rule. However, there are some problems in health care that are so large or complex that to achieve the desired competition, more novel forms of collaboration are also required. One form of collaboration — called disruptive collaboration — involves a large number of incumbent firms collaborating to collectively disrupt an entire subindustry. Such collaboration is scalably facilitated through a new vehicle called the Health Care Utility Model — a novel business model in which incumbent institutions form a self-sustaining, mission-driven corporation to provide essential products and services for customers and society at the lowest sustainable cost. Once formed, these health care utilities act as industry-competition boosters in competitively stagnant markets such as those dominated by hard-to-compete-against oligopolies.