What is Health Care ’ s LEGO?

BY KIM BELLARD Last week the esteemed Jane Sarasohn-Kahn celebrated that it was the 65th anniversary of the famous LEGO brick, linking to Jay Ong’s blog article about it (to be more accurate, it was the 65th anniversary of the patent for the LEGO brick). That led me to read Jens Andersen’s excellent history of the company: The LEGO Story: How a Little Toy Sparked the World’s Imagination.   But I didn’t think about writing about LEGO’s until I read Ben’s Cohen’s Wall Street Journal profile of  University of Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg, who studies why projects succeed or fail.  His advice: “That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big thing? What’s our Lego?” So I had to wonder: OK, healthcare – what’s your LEGO? Professor Flyvbjerg specializes in “megaprojects” — large, complex, and expensive projects.  His new book, co-authored with Dan Gardner, is How Big Things Get Done. Not to spoil the surprise (which would only be a surprise to anyone who hasn’t been part of one), their finding is that such projects usually get done poorly.  Professor Flyvbjerg’s “Iron Rule of Megaprojects” is that they are “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.” In fact, by his calculations, 99.5% of such projects miss the mark: only 0.5% are delivered on budget, on time, and with the expected benefits.  O...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: The Business of Health Care Healthcare Kim Bellard LEGO Modularity Source Type: blogs