Management’s Role in Reforming Health Care

Richard M.J. Bohmer

Health care managers are the missing link in debate over reform. Their skills and ideas are needed to sustain and improve upon multiple advances in the delivery of health care for the benefit of patients. An interview with HBS professor Richard M.J. Bohmer, MD, and an excerpt from his book Designing Care: Aligning the Nature and Management of Health Care. Read More

Health Care Under a Research Microscope

Perhaps no industry has caught the research attention of Harvard Business School faculty as much as health care. Researchers are investigating business-focused solutions on everything from improving team work among surgical teams to developing market motivations that increase the use of water purification in poor villages. Read More

Learning Tradeoffs in Organizations: Measuring Multiple Dimensions of Improvement to Investigate Learning-Curve Heterogeneity

Francesca Gino, Richard M.J. Bohmer, Amy C. Edmondson, Gary P. Pisano, and Ann B. Winslow

How and why experience leads to performance improvement has made the learning curve an important management topic for sites ranging from nuclear power plants to cardiac surgical units. This new research looks deeper at learning curves by focusing on learning rates in technology adoption in similar organizations along multiple, potentially competing dimensions. Using longitudinal data from sixteen hospitals that are adopting a new technology for cardiac surgery, it specifically studies two dimensions: efficiency and application innovation and the potential tradeoff between efficiency and application innovation. It also asks how such tradeoffs are influenced. Read More

Inside the OR: Disrupted Routines and New Technologies

A hospital operating room may seem an unlikely place to attract the attention of a group of management professors. But for HBS faculty members Amy Edmondson, Richard Bohmer and Gary Pisano it's a setting that offers great insights into work teams and the ways they adapt and learn. Read More