Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg

Health care is on a collision course with patient needs and economic reality. Without significant changes, the scale of the problem will only get worse. Rising costs, mounting evidence of quality problems, and increasing numbers of Americans without insurance are unacceptable and unsustainable, but the future of health care is not predetermined. It is a mistake to extrapolate and attempt to respond to trends within the current structure. Instead, the most pressing task for leaders in the health sector is to create a new and better structure. Effective leaders have the insight to revisit the fundamental purpose of an organization and imagine a different and more effective way to attain it. America can move now to a system based on the right kind of competition that will serve patients far better than either a government-run model or the current U.S. system.


		Elizabeth Teisberg, Ph.D., M.Engineering Elizabeth Teisberg is co-author of Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results. She is a tenured member of the faculty of the University of Virginia, in the Darden Graduate School of Business, where Dr. Teisberg received the Wachovia award for outstanding research in 2006 and Frederick S Morton award for Leadership in 2004. Professors Porter and Teisberg received the American College of Healthcare Executive’s Book of the Year Award for 2007. Dr. Teisberg speaks nationally and internationally on health care strategy and policy. She is a Senior Institute Associate at the Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. She is a member of the Global Changing Diabetes Advisory Board, and the Aspen Health Stewardship Advisory Board. She is also a senior fellow at the New England Healthcare Institute. Dr. Teisberg has ongoing research in health sector innovation, focusing on the implementation of Redefining Health Care. She also teaches in the fields of Innovation and Strategy for both MBA students and executives. She is the designer of Darden’s elective course on Innovation, and was previously the Course Head for the school’s required MBA courses on Strategy and on Operations Management. While on the faculty at Harvard, she taught the MBA required course in Strategy and the elective on Technology and Strategy. In addition to her health sector research, Dr. Teisberg’s publications have focused on strategy, real options, and environmentally sustainable innovation. She is also co-author of The Portable MBA, which has been published in five languages as well as about 50 cases and articles. Dr. Teisberg earned her Ph.D. in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University. She also holds a Master of Engineering from the University of Virginia and an A.B. degree, summa cum laude, from Washington University in St. Louis. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.