Healthcare's Innovation Problem: We're Rebranding The Past And Calling It Progress

Forbes

05-05-2025

In healthcare, what's often hailed as groundbreaking is, in reality, a repackaging of ideas we've seen before.
Over the past two decades, I've watched healthcare's innovation cycle become increasingly dominated by hype. We celebrate new terminology, fresh branding, and bold claims. Yet, beneath the surface, many of these 'new' solutions are iterations—or direct descendants—of approaches pioneered decades ago. That's not a criticism. It's a call to humility.
Take the much-discussed concept of social determinants of health. Over the past few years, the healthcare industry has collectively woken up to the idea that housing, nutrition, transportation, and social support impact health outcomes. You'd be hard-pressed to attend a conference or read a whitepaper that doesn't mention this concept.
But here's the truth: we've been here before.
In the 1980s, SCAN—then a fledgling health plan—was a lead participant in the Social HMO demonstration project, a Medicare-funded initiative that integrated medical care with social supports. The idea was simple but powerful: that care doesn't stop at the clinic door. Participants received benefits like homemaker services, personal care, adult day care, respite services, and medical transportation. These interventions weren't framed as 'social determinants'—but they were exactly that. We had a name for it then, too: common sense.
Or consider value-based care. It's heralded as a transformative movement in healthcare—a shift away from volume and toward value. But again, this isn't new. Organizations like Kaiser Permanente, Healthcare Partners, CareMore, Atrius Health, and Heritage have been operating under full-risk and global capitation models for decades. They didn't just talk about accountability—they owned it. They took financial and clinical responsibility for patient populations, investing in care models that emphasized prevention, coordination, and personalization.
The principles of value-based care aren't novel. The label is.
And what about ethnic-focused health plans—a 'new' trend in culturally competent care? Again, the industry is rediscovering what others have quietly mastered for years. Plans like the Chinese Community Health Plan, Central Health Plan of California, and Brand New Day were designed from the ground up to serve specific populations, offering linguistically appropriate services and culturally attuned care models. They were responding to unmet needs.
The point isn't to diminish today's efforts—it's to root them in reality.
Because here's the danger: when we erase history in the name of innovation, we lose the lessons that history has to offer. We lose sight of what's been tried, what's worked, what's failed, and—most critically—why. We risk repeating mistakes not out of malice or ignorance, but out of amnesia.
Healthcare doesn't suffer from a shortage of ideas. It suffers from a shortage of execution and institutional memory. The most important breakthroughs don't come from pretending we're starting from scratch; they come from building on what already exists—with humility, discipline, and relentless improvement.
That's why I believe healthcare's true innovators are not always the ones with the slickest pitch decks or the most followers on X. They're the ones doing the hard, unglamorous work of refining, iterating, and executing better than those before them—because they studied those who came before them.
To move healthcare forward, we must respect where we've been. We must stop fetishizing novelty and start celebrating progress—however incremental it may be. Innovation isn't about renaming the past. It's about improving on it.
So the next time you hear someone claim they're the first to do something in healthcare, ask them to name their predecessors. If they can't, be skeptical.
Because in this business, those who ignore history aren't just doomed to repeat it—they're doomed to think they're innovating when they're simply rebranding.
And in healthcare, where lives and livelihoods are at stake, that's not just a missed opportunity—it's a serious liability.