Our country has access to flat-out the best

technologies in health care.

There's no other system you'd rather be in than the US health

care system.

That said, it's an expensive system.

And as a result, it is even more incumbent on the US health care

system to find ways to reduce costs

without unduly harming quality.

My work heavily draws upon the idea

that our health care system needs a very, very large dose

of organizational innovation.

A lot of my research looks at the importance of familiarity

amongst members of surgical teams.

You would be amazed, in looking at a typical hospital

in the United States, as to how infrequently surgical teams

remain fully composed from day to day.

So research is absolutely central to the work

of the school, because when people come here,

they come not just to hear what was true 20 years ago.

They want to find out how is the world changing.

What are the ideas that are going

to influence the world that I'm going to inhabit as a business

leader?

And it's that restlessness about thinking hard about where

business should be going that is the heart

of what the research is that we do here at Harvard Business

School.

HBS is a fantastic environment for researchers and educators

who are really interested in marrying insights

from the real world to academic research.

So it's very unique in that regard.

You can really contact people out in the field

and learn about their ideas and then

bring them out into your classroom

and into your research.

Well, HBS is unique among business schools

in terms of the way its faculty is organized.

While we do have units in finance and accounting,

and strategy and organizational behavior,

we also have areas that really bridge

across different disciplines.

I think at HBS, our going-in approach

is that most of these problems are really complex.

And the way to really unpack them

is to begin to approach them with multiple lenses

from the get-go.

I do a lot of research on competition and consolidation.

One US industry that has consolidated a great deal

is kidney dialysis.

The question that I'm seeking to answer

is how consolidation of that business

has impacted the quality that patients are receiving

in terms of their dialysis, as well as in terms

of their ultimate outcomes.

The article that we wrote for the Harvard Business Review

dealt with what are called enterprise IT systems.

So the point of our article is they're not just simply

opportunities to reduce costs.

But they're actually about improving care delivery

and patient safety.

When I teach at HBS about US health care strategy,

students come up to me after and start talking

about their ideas for change.

And a number of them go on to join entrepreneurial ventures

and start forming them.

And that's a very exciting approach

to handling problems of the health care industry.

The real work lies in influencing the practitioners

who they're talking about, who they're trying to study,

who they're trying to influence.

And having a commitment to taking their work

beyond a conversation with each other into the real world

and having an influence in the world

is one of the important values we

hope to have every one of our scholars bring to the world.