Elizabeth Teisberg

Darden Professor

Elizabeth Teisberg, a highly regarded expert in the ongoing national and international conversations about health care transformation, has a way of sticking to the essentials. The goal of health care, she reminds us, is health. So, instead of pursuing policy that focuses on cutting costs, we should frame policy that improves value: the health outcomes relative to the dollars spent to achieve them.

In her January 2009 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Teisberg, a tenured professor at the Darden School, delivered this clear message to lawmakers:

"In most choices, people seek value - not the lowest cost regardless of poor quality, and not the highest quality without regard for cost. The tremendous opportunity in health care is how powerfully improvements in quality actually drive costs down. To see this, one must simply recognize that Americans desire more health, not more treatment. Improvement in health care need not mean more treatment and more cost. Often, improved quality means more effective treatment, better health, and lower costs."

Professor Teisberg's research centers on innovation in health care that improves value for patients and families. Health care competition has traditionally been zero-sum competition to shift costs, exercise bargaining power, and divide value. In contrast, Teisberg focuses on competition to innovate in ways that improve results by improving health, health care outcomes, and efficiency. Competition to increase value is positive sum, enabling better health and better care for more people without accelerating cost increases. When value improves, providers, clinicians, payers, employers, and government also benefit from improved outcomes for the money spent and from the improved health and productivity of citizens and employees. This is the kind of healthy competition that has driven innovation and dramatic improvements in many other services and businesses.

In 2006, Teisberg and her longtime collaborator, Harvard University's Michael Porter, published the highly acclaimed Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results (Harvard Business School Press), which won the Book of the Year Award for 2007 from the American College of Healthcare Executives and has now been published in Japanese and Portuguese. Working on implementation of these ideas, the team has developed numerous case examples and international studies illustrating the ideas in practice. Additional papers, interviews, and articles about Teisberg and Porter's work are featured on their shared Web site: www.hbs.edu/rhc/.

Teisberg continues to build on this path-breaking work through her research on the implementation of value-based innovation in health care-with employers, hospitals, clinicians, health plans, suppliers, and policy makers-and through numerous publications and presentations. She has worked with Professor Porter and with Batten Fellow Scott Wallace on the roles that all participants can play in transforming the nature of competition in health care. As part of that work, Teisberg and Wallace interviewed employers in the United States and Europe to uncover innovative approaches to improving health outcomes while lowering costs. Teisberg and Wallace also recently published "Creating a High-Value Delivery System for Health Care" in Seminars in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery and were the lead authors on a 2009 Aspen Institute report, "Health Stewardship: The Responsible Path to a Healthier Nation."

Teisberg and Wallace are also working on the redefinition of chronic care delivery, which now accounts for 70% to 80% of health care costs in the United States. They have done extensive work on diabetes, including case studies, executive education, and projects enabling implementation of new care-delivery processes. Their work emphasizes prevention of disease progression, creation of solutions for patients and families, clinical integration of care delivery, measured results, and new bundled payment approaches.