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Thursday, September 06, 2012

Business of Health Care


Sellected by the AMICOR Maria Ines Reinert Azambuja

What Business Are We In? The Emergence of Health as the Business of Health Care

David A. Asch, M.D., M.B.A., and Kevin G. Volpp, M.D., Ph.D.
N Engl J Med 2012; 367:888-889September 6, 2012
 Comments open through September 12, 2012
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Comments (13)
On January 19, 2012, after 131 years of operation, the Eastman Kodak Company filed for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. bankruptcy court. No doubt some people were surprised by this filing, because they grew up at a time when bright yellow boxes of film accompanied every family vacation and celebration. Those who were paying more attention offered many explanations for the bankruptcy. Central among them was that Kodak was late to recognize that it was not in the film and camera business: it was in the imaging business. With the advent of digital imaging, Kodak was outpaced by other companies that could better achieve consumer goals.
This lesson has been repeated many times over. In 1960, the editor of the Harvard Business Review,Theodore Levitt, wrote that the failure of railroads could be explained in part by the myopic view that they were in the railroad business and not the transportation business, which left them vulnerable to competition from cars, trucks, and planes.1 Levitt argued that it's always better to define a business by what consumers want than by what a company can produce. Kodak had built a successful enterprise producing cameras, film, and photographic paper and chemicals, but what people wanted was images, and so when a better way to get those images was found, its customers followed./.../

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