What happens if Haven Healthcare actually succeeds?
Employees get healthier. Prescription drug spending falls. Primary care becomes easier to access. Unnecessary emergency department visits and hospital stays decline. Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase spend less on healthcare.
It sounds like success. But in healthcare, lower spending for one organization often means lost revenue for another.
In Part 2 of the four-part Haven Healthcare series, Bruce Spurlock moves beyond Haven's ambitious launch and into the realities of implementation. Haven wasn't entering a blank healthcare system. It was entering an enormous network of hospitals, physicians, insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmaceutical companies, brokers, technology companies, employers, and patients, all operating with different incentives and definitions of value.
Bruce explores the uncomfortable economics behind healthcare transformation and then follows Haven as its broad mission begins turning into actual experiments. New health plan designs are tested. Primary care models are explored. Technology becomes part of the strategy. Employees begin interacting with these ideas in the real world, sometimes differently than expected.
And another challenge begins to emerge.
While Haven was developing new approaches, its founding companies remained capable of pursuing their own healthcare strategies. Amazon Care, for example, was developing alongside Haven's work, raising a much larger question about alignment, independence, governance, and who ultimately controlled the strategy.
None of these developments meant Haven was failing. But together, they were beginning to form a pattern.
In Part 3, Bruce asks: When does a setback become a warning?
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