Health Care Delivery

Health care delivery is plagued by entrenched incentives that restrict progress to incremental changes, just enough to claim forward motion, but rarely at the scale necessary to respond to the scope of actual need. It takes uniquely enabling circumstances and catalytic offerings to shake systems out of their stupor. The launch of Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin provided just such an opportunity to build something groundbreaking for a medical school uniquely committed to the community it serves. What resulted was a clean sheet redesign of care delivery that included a new team-based model of care, new facilities, new enabling technologies, collectively an exemplar of what value-based care could look like.

The centerpiece notion was the elimination of waiting rooms – a longstanding vestige of a care model that prioritizes the revenue production of a fee-for-service model over the experience, safety, and dignity of the humans it’s supposed to serve.  The elimination of the waiting room was a provocation, a challenge to the system to behave differently, meant to produce a cascade effect on every other aspect of a modern care delivery model.