It’s Time for Healthcare’s Moonshot
By David Jarrard and Ken Graboys
4-minute read
What NASA does over 10 days, healthcare does every day. Quietly, repeatedly and at scale.
The Artemis II mission – from thrilling launch to splashdown – required tens of thousands of people to send four astronauts around the moon and bring them safely home.
Today, millions of caregivers across the country will care for hundreds of thousands of patients. And, will do it again tomorrow.
Yet NASA still has something to teach us.
Successful spaceflight is not just a feat of courage and engineering. It reflects the alignment of massively complex systems, woven and held together by people of extraordinary talent, all in service to a common cause.
It takes the power of a moonshot – that singular, driving and extraordinary vision – to bring it all together.
The current emerging confluence of demographic trends on the cusp of presenting exponential challenges to our current healthcare delivery system (looking at you aging Boomers), non-linear innovation (AI… it’s not just for cocktail party tricks anymore) and an unprecedented infusion of capital into the healthcare sector (that’s what happens when you’re the only sector projecting strong growth despite market volatility) has created both the need and the opportunity for U.S. healthcare’s moonshot.
Specifically, a moonshot that stirs our industry’s imagination and galvanizes our collective will to finally create the integrated healthcare system of which we all dream – the one we have talked about for years but have not had the required combination of the wolf at our heels and the potential means at our disposal to actually do it.
We do now.
Pieces and parts
Healthcare is a system of systems – hospitals, physicians, payers, pharma, clinical technology, on and on. Each is impressive, each built to solve real problems and each with its own internal machinery.
And yet, for all that progress, the experience of care is, at best, fragmented for everyone involved.
Patients navigate a maze. Clinicians and staff work across silos. Who-pays-for-what-when can feel like an endless game of whack-a-mole. And organizations connected on paper rarely perform that way in practice.
We have built remarkable parts, but it’s not a system of care. And it falls far short of its missional promise and the potential of its pieces.
While we’ve lived with this beautiful mess for quite a while, the grinding of the gears is becoming hard to ignore for the people we serve and for us. Indeed, the voices of mounting frustration grow continuously louder.
Of course, the pressures on the industry are multifaceted. An aging population is driving more complex care needs. Demand is rising while the clinical workforce needs are strained. Costs for all are skyrocketing. You can add your own stories here.
Meanwhile, new technologies are adding capability at a rapid pace. We continue to add them faster than we integrate them, each acting like its own island against seas of trouble.
The gap between healthcare’s good intentions, high complexity and resulting performance is a problem of alignment.
It’s time for healthcare to move from assembly to alignment. The NASA way.
We go to the moon…
In 1962, when President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to go to the moon by the end of the decade, he did more than declare a destination. He cast a vision. He described what it would take: new technologies, new capabilities and a level of coordination and commitment that had never been achieved before.
In a way, the challenge of the moonshot was not reaching the moon. It was to summon the sustaining will to marshal the country’s expertise, industry and technology against a common cause.
That’s the challenge of healthcare’s moonshot, too.
What could healthcare be? What could be created when its scattered parts are aligned, integrated and directed toward a compelling purpose?
- It looks like care that is continuous, not episodic.
- It looks like a system that leverages humans and AI to guide every patient, rather than leaving them to navigate alone.
- It looks like care delivered across all settings – at home, through the screen, in person – without friction or loss of continuity.
- It looks like a system that is affordable, accessible and equitable for all.
- It looks like clinicians who are supported by tools that lift administrative burden and preserve human judgment.
- It looks like financial incentives, labor workflows, clinical care decisions and costs that are aligned around outcomes, not activity or location.
This moonshot vision is not an improved collection of parts or a strengthening of industry silos, but the system – a true system of systems – we’ve all dreamed about.
But it remains a dream if we cannot find the will to act together.
As an industry, we are entering a time where we will have all that we need – the talent, the clinical experience, the technology and know-how, the sources of capital – to build this healthcare rocket. It’s not for lack of resources that we have not yet built what we know could be better than what we offer today. All the tools are on the tool bench, waiting for the visionary engineer.
New components are emerging every day that could accelerate this work of weaving together. But while the advent of powerful AI can help us accelerate toward this grand synthesis, harnessing the will to act is our work.
After all, alignment at this scale doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t fall together well on its own. It’s designed, reinforced and led.
There is a story – perhaps apocryphal – of President Kennedy visiting NASA and asking a custodian what he did. “I’m helping put a man on the moon,” he replied.
In aligned systems, all the work connects to the mission.
We have spent years assembling healthcare.
Now let’s get to the moon by the end of the decade.
Ken Graboys is the co-founder and CEO of Chartis. His experience in healthcare consulting spans 30 years, working with academic medical centers, integrated delivery systems and healthcare service organizations to materially improve the delivery of care.
Ken and David Jarrard, chairman of the Jarrard Executive Committee, are colleagues and healthcare thought leadership partners. To read more of their insights, please see Latest Healthcare Trends and Analysis.
Image credit: Savannah Ray
Contributors: Emme Nelson Baxter
