Patients are increasingly developing sophisticated medical devices and services to meet their own needs — often without help from companies that produce or sell medical products. In this way they are able to benefit from advances that aren’t commercially available. Here, we’ll look at two examples — a solution for managing Type 1 diabetes and one for managing Crohn’s disease — and consider them within the context of the free innovation movement that’s gaining momentum across industries.

Oftentimes contending with overwhelming quantities of data, the health care industry could lessen its reliance on intuitive decision-making by making better use of machine learning.

Innovation is transforming the health care industry, with unlikely collaborators teaming up to provide higher-quality, lower-cost services. In this interview with MIT SMR, Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, an expert in health care delivery and innovation, discusses recent collaborations between retailers and insurers, such as CVS’s partnership with Aetna and Walmart’s with Humana, and explains why hospitals and other providers must be more innovative, too.

Innovation and disruption are transforming the health care industry, with unlikely partners like Walmart and Humana teaming up to deliver high-quality, low-cost care to customers. Regina Herzlinger, the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and an expert in health care delivery and innovation, discusses the lessons such collaborations between health care retailers and insurers offer for managers.

To better serve doctors, patients, and the community, clinicians and executives should both have a voice in setting a hospital’s goals.

John Glaser, vice president of population health at Cerner Corporation, discusses the opportunities and challenges presented by health care data.

Changing consumer expectations, new regulations, and an influx of patient data has created a perfect storm for health care organizations like Schumacher Clinical Partners to rethink how they leverage digital tools to better serve their patients and providers.

In an interview with MIT SMR, Cardinal Health’s Brent Stutz describes how the company’s three-year-old innovation center, Fuse, uses a “fail fast and often” mindset toward innovation. “Our innovation process has three phases: explore, experiment, and then pilot. We have an opportunity to pull the plug at any time… I’m not afraid to try 42 things and only have six make it out the other end,” Stutz says.

Gone are the days of centralized control of information and decision-making within organizations. With information now widely distributed among employees, Kaiser Permanente CEO Bernard J. Tyson says today’s executives face a critical question: “How do I charge up the organization so that we’re maximizing the intellects of all of our people?”

Writing in The New Yorker, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee of Columbia University Medical Center describes the increasingly nuanced role smart machines are playing in cancer screening and what it means for the future.

Kristin Darby, CIO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America, is keenly aware of the impact of digital technology on patient care. “We crave constructive disruption, so we are always challenging ourselves with the question, ‘how can technology positively impact our patients?’ If there’s value for the patient, we’re interested and we dig deeper.” Darby is interviewed by Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane, associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and a guest editor for MIT SMR.

The holy grail of medicine is therapy that is customized for the patient. But to get there, health care researchers need huge amounts of data to help identify which genes affect health. The Million Veteran Program has tapped one of the largest cohorts available — U.S. military personnel — to obtain the dataset, but managing the security of this sensitive data is a challenge. In a Q&A, two of the project’s lead scientists, J. Michael Gaziano and Saiju Pyarajan, explain the process.

The only way to move forward on society’s biggest challenges may be through consortiums. But it’s not easy to assemble such groups or to keep them together. The experiences of The Biomarkers Consortium, a nine-year-old public-private partnership in the health industry, presents five lessons in managing these kinds of complex collaborations. These lessons are useful for anyone trying to build consensus to address broad societal challenges among multiple stakeholders with both common and divergent interests.

Intermountain Healthcare is leading the way in data driven healthcare. In an example from Intermountain’s own operating rooms, the use of data to measure the impact of standardized surgeon attire on infection rates resulted in a significant drop in those rates. The infection control scenario is just one result from decades of work at Intermountain to build a data culture. Over the years, clinicians have learned to work together on a concerted effort to bring data based insights to clinicians and managers.

What does it take to bring world class digital technology to one of the world’s leading medical centers? As chief information officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Dr. John Halamka leads exactly that charge. Overseeing digital strategies designed to make patients safer while being completely secure and stable is, he says, like “being asked to change the wings on a 747 while it’s flying. Total security, total reliability and stability, with complete innovation at the same time.”

American health care is undergoing a data-driven transformation — and Intermountain Healthcare is leading the way. This MIT Sloan Management Review case study examines the data and analytics culture at Intermountain, a Utah-based company that runs 22 hospitals and 185 clinics. Data-driven decision making has improved patient outcomes in Intermountain’s cardiovascular medicine, endocrinology, surgery, obstetrics and care processes — while saving millions of dollars in procurement and in its supply chain.

At the Big Data Innovation Summit, Kaiser’s John Mattison detailed his expectations for the future of health care. He envisions a data-driven system that relies on genetic data in combination with personal data from the patient regarding exposures and lifestyle to help physicians predict health risks. But he also warned that companies have a great deal of work to do to meet the challenges of health care’s digital transformation.

Dr. Yan Chow is a director in the Innovation and Advanced Technology group at Kaiser Permanente. While a physician with over two decades of primary care clinical practice experience, Dr. Chow also has a keen interest in technology (he’s founded several technology startups). His areas of expertise: health care IT innovation, telehealth, big data and analytics. Here, he talks about innovation and the future of health care.

The idea is simple: develop a methodology that ties patient outcomes to provider fees so that clinicians are rewarded when patients’ health improves. Making it happen is a lot more complicated. When WellPoint undertook this task, it discovered that there was more to it than simply the challenge of applying data analytics technology — the company’s innovation processes had to be reinvented.

It’s no secret that the fee-for-service model in U.S. health care is a driving factor in spiraling costs. WellPoint’s innovative plan to shift to a value-based payment plan may prove to be a key innovation that keeps a lid on those costs. But as commentator Sam Ransbotham points out, their effort to change the payment system also highlights a need for process changes at WellPoint itself.