I’m at a conference at Harvard Medical School today, with various industry and policy luminaries. Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra and HHS CTO Todd Park were just speaking. Reginza Herzlinger is giving a talk right now. Clayton Christensen was here this morning. Gotta love Harvard, and I’ve got a number of thoughts which I’ll wrap into a set of posts over the next few days.

But until then, I wanted to draw out a single point that has recurred a lot in various conversations I’ve had over the last few days. Christensen brought it up again in his keynote this morning. It’s this: the best care for complex disease is delivered by groups of physicians who are coordinated with each other. That coordination comes from being in the same room.

Dr. Christensen’s example (from his book) is an acquaintance spent years looking for appropriate treatment for his asthma. Over several years he saw many different specialists, and they didn’t solve the problem. Then he saw the same set of specialists (different people, same expertise), all in the same room, after flying to Denver. And they figured it out in 30 minutes.

I saw something similar this winter after visiting a microvascular disease clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital. It was a volunteer effort, run on a Saturday morning, with 6 or 7 experience specialists and a few residents and fellows. They saw patient after patient, all of whom had been bouncing through the system – and more or less without exception, they knocked each problem down as fast as it came up.

So here’s a question for healthcare reformers and healthcare technology innovators. How can we create that same quality of care for everyone who has a difficult to diagnose condition?