When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.

HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous

leaders through raw honest career questions

that we all face.

Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free

wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast. I'm Steve Prokesh. Today I'm talking with Harvard Business School

Professor Regina Hertzlinger. She's a leading proponent of the view that innovations

could lower the cost and improve the quality of health care in the United States.

But she contends that big hospital systems are an obstacle to such innovations.

Thank you for joining us, Reggie.

My pleasure. What are the kinds of innovations that you feel could

improve the delivery of health care? So I like to bucket innovations into three categories.

One of them is consumer driven innovation,

which include what's called retail medicine, which are at these clinics that are in convenient locations.

They do things like flu shots, but increasingly they're tending to the very demanding needs of self-care for people who have chronic diseases like diabetes.

Then there is a great boom in urgent care centers and you know what

these do is they free up the hospital emergency rooms for genuine emergencies.

Retail medicine, urgent care, they not only increased convenience,

but they are because they're lower costs they can reduce overall

health care costs. Then there are things like sensing how well you are and the wearable sensor movements where these sensors are knitted into various

fabrics or into watches or other things that you might wear.

That's terrific for again, especially people

...