This case study focuses on HealthPartners, America's largest consumer-governed, nonprofit health care organization. HealthPartners’ integrated health system acts as both insurer and provider of care. According to Innosight’s research, this system design, which includes functions such as ranking physicians, providing patients control over physicians’ schedules and incorporating dental services and coverage has led HealthPartners to deliver a high quality of care at a cost that is even less than Minnesota’s already low average (30% below the national average).
This case study is divided into three sections. The first section considers HealthPartners’ path to integration and the critical steps to becoming a successful, integrated health care system. The second section examines the present-day systems and highlights practices and disruptive innovations on integration. The third section presents learnings for other health care systems that are attempting to move toward integration and considers policy and payment reforms that would most effectively stimulate the spread of integrated systems.
Disruptive innovations in health care have the potential to decrease costs while improving both the quality and accessibility of care. This is one in a series of Pioneer-funded case studies by the Innosight Institute that uses disruptive innovation theory to examine integrated delivery systems and aims to identify the critical factors necessary to achieve increased quality, reduced cost, and access improvements.