by Wendy Johnson

Today's wired healthcare era is exploding in knowledge. Too bad so many healthcare systems are so "fragmented and disorganized" that they're unable to absorb it.

"The result is chaos," says Thomas H. Lee, network president of Partners HealthCare System, in Boston and professor at Harvard Medical School, in a thought-provoking article that appears in the Harvard Business Review magazine.

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Organizing the chaos requires a new kind of leadership at every level of the healthcare system--one that values quality of care over quantity and understands how to use performance measurement as a motivating tool, for starters. He cites leaders at the Cleveland Clinic and Seattle's Virginia Mason Medical Center as examples of organizations that successfully put patients first--in their physical design as well as in the structure of their care.

"A shift to value-oriented, performance-driven healthcare requires doctors to adapt or even reject some ways of working that are embedded in medicine's past," he concludes. "Difficult as this change will be, I am optimistic that the new generation of leaders will achieve it. In truth, they have no choice. Defending the status quo is no longer a viable strategy, even in the near term."

You can read the whole article here.

Wendy Johnson is the publisher of FierceHealthcare and a longtime healthcare journalist. She can be reached at wjohnson@fiercemarkets.com.