Consumer-Driven Health Care: Implications for Providers, Payers, and Policy-Makers

Professor Herzlinger documents how the consumer-driven health care movement is being implemented and its impact on insurers, providers, new intermediaries, and governments. With additional contributions by health care’s leading strategists, innovators, regulators and scholars, Consumer-Driven Health Care presents a compelling vision of a health care system built to satisfy the people it serves.

This comprehensive resource includes the most important thinking on the topic and compelling case studies of consumer-driven health care (CDHC) in action, here and abroad, including new consumer-driven intermediaries for information and support; types of insurance plans; focused factories for delivering health care; personalized drugs and devices; and government roles.

Increased consumer control of health care is shaking up the medical and insurance systems. In Consumer-Driven Health Care, Harvard Business School’s acclaimed professor Regina E. Herzlinger states that hospitals, doctors, benefits administrators, accountants, government policymakers, and insurers had better adapt or else they will be replaced.

Professor Herzlinger documents how the consumer-driven health care movement is being implemented and its impact on insurers, providers, new intermediaries, and governments. With additional contributions by health care’s leading strategists, innovators, regulators and scholars, Consumer-Driven Health Care presents a compelling vision of a health care system built to satisfy the people it serves.

"Professor Herzlinger provides a compelling argument for consumer-driven health care. The health care system has been marked for decades with rising costs and consumer dissatisfaction. Professor Herzlinger challenges the reader to look beyond solutions that are based on what consumers should want to solutions that give consumers what they want."

–Barbara Bigelow, Ph.D., Co-Editor, Health Care Management Review, Professor of Management, Clark University Graduate School of Management

"Regina Herzlinger has a formidable reputation as an expert on reforming health care. There are lessons here for all of us who care about reforming our health systems to make them better."

–David Willets, MP, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary and Member of Parliament , UK

"This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to know why the American model of health insurance benefits that has been around for about 50 years is all washed up, and what is most likely to replace it."

–Roger Feldman, Blue Cross Professor of Health Insurance, University of Minnesota

"Professor Herzlinger can persuade corporate CEOs, Washington policymakers, benefits administrators, and hospital executives to reshape their strategy based on a market run by consumers. This book translates health economics into simple English, reducing the "mystery-inside-a-conundrum" field into everyday transactions like selecting a health plan that any health care consumer can recognize. Consumer-Driven Health Care will be a top candidate for health care’s 'book of the year.' "

–Russell C. Coile, Jr., consultant, editor, Russ Coile’s Health Trends, and author, Competing On Excellence (2003)

Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.