By MATTHEW HOLT
This is a very brief review of Rock Health founder Halle Tecco’s Massively Better Healthcare. Halle is trying to do something quite complicated in this book. It’s really a three-part attempt to help somebody who is relatively new to health care entrepreneurship understand what the hell they are getting into.
The first part is a brief assessment of the current US healthcare system. If you’ve been working in health care for a long time you can probably skip this but if you’re an entrepreneur coming into American healthcare for the first time, it’s a good introduction. It may though not be enough given how messed up and complex the American system is. There are of course plenty of other great books to read about that. It’s not really Halle’s aim to do more than warn you about the mess the system is here.
The second part is essentially a guide to how to do innovation and how to build a company. This is very valuable. I wish Halle had written more in this part and included more of the work she’s done with the many companies she has stewarded and invested in because there’s another book to be dragged out of her about this. ( I’m sure she would hate me for saying this having just finished this one!). But I wanted to know more about all the boardrooms and strategy sessions she’d been in and the conversation she had about company building. For me this was the best part of the book because it has a lot of great nuggets about innovation. I just wish there’d been more here and that the examples were longer and deeper.
The last section of the book is four good rules for what works and what doesn’t and that’s a lot of useful stuff in there as well. She ends the book with an impassioned plea for people to come and fix the health care system, by working on individual problems within it by taking what she calls Smart Shots.
To me this appeal is overly optimistic but it’s also probably the only way that people can actually fix anything in health care given the current state of the system. She actually references the cranky old guard (which I think I include myself in) but I think she’s specifically talking about people who have spent a long time in big hospital systems or health plans and feel that nothing can be changed from within. Because those organizations are so rich and powerful I personally think the only way to really change health care is to have a “meteor hitting the Earth” extinction event for them, but I’ve written enough about that elsewhere.
So all in all I think Massively Better Healthcare is a very valuable read especially for somebody coming into healthcare with intention to fix the system. But I think it will help those people make health care better incrementally rather than massively.
I think I will actually prefer the sequel, so long as what happens in that is that we get more out of Halle about the experiences she’s had and the companies she’s worked with. There is probably nobody better to deliver a real tell-all about the “warts and all” of building health tech startup companies and although we got a good flavor from her in this first book, I think that there is actually a lot more to come from her.
Matthew Holt is the publisher of THCB
