2011 Summit

On March 16-18, 2011, thought leaders from mental health, substance use, and the larger health care field came together in New Orleans to examine disruptive innovation and its implications for our field in the era of dramatic health reform. What are disruptive innovations? How do we create and encourage them? And how do we lead the field as they take root?

Disruptive Innovation’s Power to Upend Markets

In the 1990s, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” to describe a simpler, cheaper product or service that ultimately upends an established marketplace. The new product or service starts out in a rudimentary form and is initially targeted for delivery to previously unserved or underserved groups. As the new product or service takes hold, it is refined and ultimately displaces more established products or services that are more expensive, more complex, and unable to adapt.

A useful example of disruptive innovation is the personal computer, which has made computing accessible and affordable to most Americans. In the 1970s, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and IBM were leaders in the computing business, a marketplace that was limited to those few with sufficient resources and skill to buy and operate mainframe computers. Visionaries at IBM took up the recently invented microprocessor and created a new business model that brought an initially modest product (relative to powerful mainframe computers) to a brand-new market – the home user. DEC was not able to make the transition to personal computing and did not survive.

Disruptive innovations have been documented throughout the business and technology fields. More recently, the ideas have been compellingly applied to health care. Christensen and his colleagues’ 2007 book, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, provides a thorough overview of the concept, demonstrating how disruptive innovations are making and will make health care accessible and affordable for most people.

Applying Disruptive Innovation to Behavioral Health: The 2011 Summit

As we in the behavioral health field scramble to educate ourselves and begin conceptualizing how we must change to survive this era of health reform, disruptive innovation offers a powerful framework to ground our thinking.

At ACMHA’s 2011 Summit, we will dive into disruptive innovation and explore ways to harness its power to make behavioral health care more accessible and affordable in a new era. Using the language and framework of disruptive innovation, we will examine key questions such as:

• What are the technological enablers that will routinize diagnosis and treatment, conserving highly expensive, skilled professionals for atypical cases and maximizing the use of providers with different training?
• What new business models in the provision of care, insurance, and reimbursement will make behavioral health care less costly and more accessible?
• What are the key elements of new value networks (i.e., the suppliers, retailers, and consumers that make up the context in which business models operate) that will allow disruptive innovations in behavioral health care to flourish?
• What are the opportunities – through health reform and elsewhere – to facilitate disruptive innovation through current and new regulations and standards?

We will look not only at what will be but what is – that is, those areas of disruptive innovation that are already shaking up the behavioral health care field and health care in general. These include employing peers and community health workers as providers, establishing personal health records, and providing collaborative care for managing behavioral health conditions in general medical settings. We will talk about how to recognize a disruptive innovation when you see it and how you might go about developing them yourself.

We will also focus on the critical role of leadership in an era of disruptive innovation. Across all fields, established leaders often fight disruptive innovations, with the desire to hang on to the status quo. We will examine ways that we can use our leadership instead to support the adoption of disruptive innovations in behavioral health and the larger health care field.