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From 2005 through the middle of 2007, one public company after another was bought out and went private. The size of the deals escalated — Hertz for $15 billion, HCA for $33 billion, Equity Office Properties for $39 billion, TXU Energy for $44 billion. Then the megadeals stopped. Andrew Metrick explains what happened.

Sensing a broad change in the capital markets in recent years, the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance set out to better understand what was happening. Jonathan Koppell describes what he and his colleagues learned from a series of discussions with investors, directors, managers, and regulators around the globe.

Healthcare is a field known for its complexity and fragmentation. Managing a massive cross-sectoral healthcare project is always a challenge. Coordinating the healthcare response to a disaster puts a strained system under even more pressure. John Piescik ’81 looked into the way the healthcare system responds to disaster for MITRE a not-for-profit company that operates three federally funded research and development centers. His findings may have implications well beyond healthcare, providing a means to manage solutions to some of the complex problems facing society.

Organizational change can occur at the level of technological innovation or at the level of human interaction. Consulting firm Katzenbach Partners studied customer service across industries and developed a model that proposes creating competitive advantage through a holistic approach to customer service. A recent white paper, “The Empathy Engine: Achieving Breakthroughs in Patient Service,” applies this analysis to the healthcare industry. Q3 talked with Jenny Machida, a leader in Katzenbach Partners’ healthcare practice and one of the authors of the paper, about the personal side of patient service.

A recurring theme in discussions of how to improve the U.S. healthcare system is the hope that technological innovation will provoke leaps in the quality and efficiency of care. Thomas Enders is a managing director for the $1.2 billion Global Health Solutions group of CSC. He provides an insider's perspective on what technological change can accomplish.

The healthcare debate often turns on numbers, but statistics are easy to distort or misunderstand.

MinuteClinic was founded in 2000 to provide retail healthcare — walk-in care for common illnesses. There are more than 500 MinuteClinics across 26 states and they have seen more than two million patients. CVS bought MinuteClinic in 2006 and most clinics are located in CVS pharmacies. Q3 talked with Cris Ross, MinuteClinic’s chief information officer, and Dr. James Hartert, the company’s chief medical officer, about how their business could change healthcare.

International comparative healthcare is a largely untapped field. Health policy researcher Jennifer Baron '05, describes programs that suggest steps toward aligning incentives for all participants around value judged on health results. Even looking at countries that provide near-universal access to care, she finds that a comprehensive value-based system doesn’t yet exist.

Competitive strategy expert Michael Porter, the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, has shaken up the thinking around healthcare reform with Redefining Health Care, a book he coauthored with Elizabeth Teisberg, associate professor at the Darden School of Business. Porter talked with Q3 about his ideas on how to bring the right kind of competition to healthcare and developments since the 2006 release of his book.

Kathy Lavidge argues that access to healthcare affects aspects of life far beyond the medical.