If you’re going to get ambitious about your next task, don’t go and talk to normal people about it. You’ll only get normal answers. Get out of your comfortable little world and step into a completely alien one. As we say round here, when worlds collide, transformation happens.

Love that passage from Brian Millar’s 2012 Fast Company piece. (Plus, it gives me the awesome chance to nod to the eccentrics and outliers—like Millar’s dominatrix and tattooed hipster set—and their unlikely importance to pioneering, breakthrough ideas).

This week RWJF extended another grant to the Khan Academy; this one for $1.25 million.  I say another as we started this health education journey with Sal, Rishi and the Khan team—right after Sal’s outstanding 2011 TED/Long Beach talk. That discussion resulted in a preliminary 2012 $350,000 bet on this great team. We were intrigued by their big idea—and we thought the world might be too.

What’s that big idea again? Just this: an entirely free, utterly fantastic health education for anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection.

Today, the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute, Inc. (HCI3®) released “Improving Incentives to Free Motivation,” a report developed with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), that makes a bold assertion: Financial incentives won’t fix our payment problems in health care.

In a guest post on The Health Care Blog today, I outlined why simply throwing more carrots and sticks at doctors and patients won’t improve the quality or affordability of our health care:

Until we get [the] human motivators right in health care, we can try all sorts of complicated, elegant payment models and formulas and still ultimately not get to the goal of sustainable high value. It will always be just over the horizon. Let's absolutely be smart about incentives in health care, but let's also get away from talking about simple carrots and sticks. Instead, let’s find the right mix of motivators to promote the creativity we need to get the best care every single time.”

The Khan Academy, AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced the winners of the Khan Academy MCAT Video Competition today. Our goal was to identify up to 15 individuals who demonstrated particular skill, aptitude, and passion for making compelling online educational videos that will help prepare viewers for the Medical College Admissions Test. 

It was a challenging challenge, to say the least. Participants had to prepare and submit three educational videos on MCAT material along with 10 related questions about their video topics. The winners will have the opportunity to attend an all-expenses-paid Khan Academy boot camp in the San Francisco Bay Area from July 14-21 to hone their video-making skills.

The competition was popular—67 individuals submitted videos and questions. Entrants included undergrads, medical students, nurses, MDs, PhDs and faculty from 22 states, D.C. and one territory. Over a recent weekend, the judges inhaled all 67 submissions—about 200 videos and 600 questions—and identified the lucky 15 winners. 

I recently stepped out of my largely virtual, long distance relationship with the Khan Academy and went behind the wizard’s curtain to see how it’s actually done.  Certainly, we here at RWJF have met many Khan personalities in real life, including Sal, himself, as well as Dr. Rishi Desai, who leads the Khan Healthcare and Medicine Initiative. However, it's one thing to meet individuals outside of their natural habitat—and quite another to track them back to their offices in Mountain View, California, and see what gives. 

From SFO, I carefully followed my Droid Navigator’s directions off Highway 101 into a warren of non-descript low-slung office buildings—non-descript except for the telltale proliferation of Google signs and young adults riding colorful Google bikes.  I drove around to the back of several of those complexes and finally found the correct numbered grouping.  It really could have been any office or doctors’ office complex in the U.S.  The Khan suite is on the second floor. 

Earlier this year, Fast Company released its list of the 50 most innovative companies and named Nike No. 1. In that article, Nike CEO Mark Parker noted, “One of my fears is being this big, slow, constipated, bureaucratic company that's happy with its success…. Companies fall apart when their model is so successful that it stifles thinking that challenges it.” Kaiser Permanente did not make the Fast Company list—this year.  But this nation-leading health care provider is working hard to ensure it’s not a big plugged-up company satisfied with its past success. KP works hard at innovating. KP's leaders and staff clearly do not take their past success and excellence for granted.