Healthcare to the Home: Enabling Distributed Health Service Delivery by Removing Barriers to Entrepreneurial Exploration

Abstract

Increasing the overall share of health services provided directly to the home constitutes a significant—and as yet mostly unrealized—opportunity to improve healthcare in the United States. Home healthcare as I define it in this paper includes four service models: (1) medical house calls or home-based primary care, (2) health agency care or peer-to-peer health service delivery, (3) telehealth or remote medicine and mobile health (mHealth), and (4) exponential technologies for healthcare. Key to realizing the benefits of healthcare to the home is to remove barriers to entrepreneurial exploration that historically have constrained the evolution of service models in the healthcare industry, notably (1) labor market barriers to entry (e.g., licensing and certification requirements or scope-of-practice rules) and (2) technical barriers to entry (e.g., regulatory approvals, standards for interoperability).

Keywords: entrepreneurship, distributed health services, health service delivery, healthcare innovation, health service markets, home healthcare

JEL Classification: I11, I18, L22, L26, L8, O3