The good news is that we have a lot of experimentation going on in healthcare right now.  Regular readers of this space know that we are huge fans of innovation as the lever that will allow us to solve the myriad of issues facing the healthcare industry and thus, the country.

ACO models, patient centered medical homes, bundled payment schemes, public and private HIEs, mobile applications, population management interventions, remote monitoring technologies...and we could go on and on.

These are all good things, new attempts at solving old problems.  Working at the outer edge of the system with new technologies and new business models. 

And we are starting to hear some promising results emerge from these laboratories.  Press releases touting positive results are a welcome read and they are coming more frequently.  We like those.

But a word of caution is in order.

Scale matters. 

There are a lot of things that can be made to work when the scale of the experiment is limited to something manageable.  Alpha and beta tests, pilots and trials are supposed to be small.  But that also means that one of the most critical variables -- what happens when we try to scale this up to a level that matters -- is not tested.

History is full of great experiments that could not scale.

Note the good news from the lab, then pay attention to see what happens when they try to roll it out in a big way.