Morning Read: What makes an innovator?

Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of health care:

What makes an innovator? Professors from Harvard University and Brigham Young University spent six years searching for answers to that question. After interviews with thousands of executives, including plenty of big names like Michael Dell and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the researchers concluded that the key characteristics of an innovator can be taught; they’re not simply ingrained or genetic as some contend. Their study, “The Innovator’s DNA ,” lists several key characteristics possessed by top innovators. Those qualities include a willingness to ask questions, challenge the status quo and seek out new ideas via networking, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.

Of course, one could respond to that by saying, “It took you guys six years to come up with that?” Nonetheless, no one can deny the success of people like Dell and Bezos, so if it worked for them, the formula is certainly worth repeating if you’re a budding entrepreneur. And it’s a reminder that networking is more than just tempting more people to follow you on Twitter.

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[Innovators] use networking as a way to gain access to find — and get feedback for — new ideas. They observe what others are doing and question whether it would benefit them to follow suit. “They don’t use networking just as a tool to mobilize resources or promote themselves,” a researcher said. “It’s a totally different focus on networking to find and test ideas.”

Hard times in Miami: A key Miami health system is teetering on the brink of insolvency and it looks like uncompensated care is a big part of the reason. When the Jackson Health System’s executives are throwing around phrases like “health care death spiral” you know things have gotten bad. The six-hospital chain is of critical importance to the city for numerous reasons, but a big one is that one of its hospitals is the only Level 1 trauma center set up to provide emergency care around the clock in the nation’s eighth-largest county. Vendors and patients are fleeing, the hospital isn’t paying bills and things are getting ugly quickly. While the reasons why things seems to have deteriorated so far aren’t all clear, uncompensated care is certainly one–at one of the system’shospitals a whopping 45 percent of patients are uninsured.

Indeed, uncompensated care could well be the next health care crisis in America as hospitals struggle to stay afloat and have no choice but to merge with bigger rivals. Mergers then create powerful near-monopolies in which one hospital system is able to control a market, dictate prices and gouge consumers. Let’s hope the Jackson saga isn’t a harbinger of things to come.

Unnecessary emergency-room visits: When talks turns to wasteful spending in health care, as it often does, the concept of unnecessary emergency room visits is nearly sure to follow. But it shouldn’t be, according to two emergency physicians writing in Slate. For one thing, ER care only accounts for about 3 percent of annual health spending. Further, only 12 percent of ER visits aren’t actually urgent, which hardly implies that the care given isn’t necessary, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians. Certainly, some dollars are wasted in the nation’s emergency rooms, and that’s unavoidable to a large extent. But hardly enough that ERs should be accused of being more wasteful than any other sectors of our bloated and expensive health system, the authors contend.

Photo from flickr user WalkingGeek