Task Shifting Could Help Lower Costs in U.S. Health Care

Three examples from India show how.

by

Vijay Govindarajan

and

Ravi Ramamurti

by

Vijay Govindarajan

and

Ravi Ramamurti

July 19, 2018

Hayon Thapaliya/HBR Staff

Summary.

The idea that one should match the skill level of the individual to the skill requirements of a task has influenced how many businesses operate. That’s why lawyers are helped by paralegals, professors by teaching assistants, and chefs by sous chefs. This logic also applies to health care. For years, nurse practitioners and physician assistants have taken on tasks that doctors once performed. This has saved money, of course, but it has also improved quality, because doctors and paramedics perform tasks that best fit their expertise. Research shows that there is a lot more room for task shifting in U.S. health care.

If you ran a fancy restaurant, would you want the chef also to clean dishes and mop the floor? Of course not. You’d hire others to do these things and let the chef focus on producing delicious food. This simple idea — that one should match the skill level of the individual to the skill requirements of a task — has influenced how many businesses operate. That’s why lawyers are helped by paralegals, professors by teaching assistants, and chefs by sous chefs.

Vijay Govindarajan is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, and faculty partner at the Silicon Valley incubator Mach 49. He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. His latest book is Fusion Strategy: How Real-Time Data and AI Will Power the Industrial Future . His Harvard Business Review articles “Engineering Reverse Innovations” and “Stop the Innovation Wars” won McKinsey Awards for best article published in HBR. His HBR articles “How GE Is Disrupting Itself” and “The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention” are HBR all-time top-50 bestsellers. Follow him on LinkedIn.
vgovindarajan
Ravi Ramamurti is the University Distinguished Professor of International Business and Strategy and the director of the Center for Emerging Markets at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. He studies strategy and innovation in emerging markets and has published several articles on these topics in HBR. He is a coauthor, with Vijay Govindarajan, of Reverse Innovation in Health Care: How to Make Value-Based Delivery Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). Follow him on LinkedIn.

Task Shifting Could Help Lower Costs in U.S. Health Care

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