health policy
Matthew Holt
This is a very brief review from Rock Health founder Halle Tecco. much better health care. Halle is attempting something quite complex in this book. This is a three-part attempt to help someone relatively new to the medical business understand what they’re up to.
The first part is a brief assessment of the current American health care system. If you’ve been in healthcare for a long time, you may want to skip this, but if you’re a first-time American healthcare entrepreneur, it’s a good introduction. But considering how messy and complex the American system is, that may not be enough. Of course, there are many other great books to read about this. In reality, it’s not Halle’s goal to do more than warn about chaos in the system.
The second part is essentially a guide on how to innovate and build a company. This is very worthwhile. I wish Halle had written more in this area and included more of the work she has done with the many companies she has managed and invested in. Because I have another book to pull from her about this. (I’m sure she’ll hate it when I finish this and say this!). But I wanted to know more about all the board meetings and strategy sessions she attended and the conversations she had about building the company. For me, this was the best part of the book because it had a lot of great content about innovation. I wish there was more content here and the examples were longer and deeper.
The last section of the book gives you four good rules for what works and what doesn’t, and there’s a lot of useful content in there too. She ends the book with an impassioned appeal for people to come and fix our health care system by solving individual problems using what she calls Smart Shots.
To me, this appeal is overly optimistic, but it also may be the only way for people to actually fix anything in their health care, given the current state of the system. She’s actually referring to the crusty old guard (which I think I’m a part of), but I think she’s especially talking about people who have spent a long time in a big hospital system or health plan and feel like nothing can change on the inside. Those organizations are so rich and powerful that I personally think the only way to really change health care is to create a “meteor hitting Earth” extinction event for them. But I’ve written enough about this elsewhere.
So overall I think much better health care This is an invaluable resource, especially for those who receive health care with the intention of fixing the system. But I think it will help those people improve their health care incrementally rather than massively.
I actually think I would prefer a sequel. What happens in it is that you learn more about the experiences Halle had and the companies she worked with. There’s no one better to tell the real story of the “glitches and everything” that goes into building a medtech startup company. Although we got a good impression from her in this first book, I really think there’s more to come from her.
Matthew Holt is the publisher of THCB.
