August 15, 2006

Focused Factories in Healthcare

Dr. Stanley Feld has an excellent blog where he posts exclusively on repairing the US healthcare system. He points out in an older post the topic of "Focused Factories", basically hospitals that only focus on one ailment and because of this specialization the cost of delivering service is far cheaper than the standard hospital.

This idea isn't new, well maybe to healthcare, but not to other industries.

Specialization always yields a better product from the sheer ability to concentrate the focus on the production of a single thing. Exclusivity of focus allows for naturally and organically developing efficiencies that could not exist when trying to be a generalist. These efficiencies translate into a low cost of goods sold while at the same time improving the quality of the service or good offered or produced.

How do we provide incentives for this sort of thing to occur in the United States?