About Us

Cutting costs through education, networking, and innovation

The Institute for Affordable Health Care (IAHC) is an organization dedicated to making U.S. health care more cost-effective without sacrificing quality. To do this, we are…

Launching a web site aimed at identifying and promoting “cost-unwinding” innovations
Forming a community of national health care experts with extensive experience reducing health care costs;
Helping experts learn from each other and work together to devise innovative approaches to cost management; and
Communicating valuable approaches, solutions, and tools to decision-makers and policy-makers.

IAHC.com has a section devoted to root causes of our high health care costs. “Cost-unwinding” innovations are organized in ten different categories:

Redesigned clinical processes that enable more cost-effective care delivery
Cost-saving technologies and process innovations that improve efficiency
Organizational changes that help health care companies improve cost management
Strategic asset repositioning that reallocates capital to reduce costs
Changes in the health care work force that improve performance and efficiency
Robust financial systems that improve cost measurement and management
World-class business processes that help smaller players realize economies of scale
Consumer engagement tools that help consumers make better quality / price tradeoffs
Realigned incentives that motivate consumers and payers to reduce costs
Governmental initiatives to stimulate price competition

Readers may contribute comments to the general blog or any of these categories. The categories themselves are not “cast in stone” and will evolve over time. Contributions should be as specific as possible, providing tangible evidence of actual or potential impact on cost, wherever possible. Diatribes without data will generally be screened out…unless they are highly entertaining.

Fellow Travelers

A number of other organizations are aimed at goals similar to IAHC’s, including the Health Care Cost Institute (healthcostinstitute.org), the Council for Affordable Health Insurance (cahi.org), the Institute for Clinical & Economic Review (icer-review.org), the Bi-Partisan Policy Center (bipartisanpolicy.org), Stanford University’s Clinical Excellence Research Center (cerc.stanford.edu), the Health Care Systems Research Network (hcsrn.org), and others. We hope to collaborate with many of these organizations as we pursue our common vision.
IAHC’s Executive Director is David G. Anderson, Ph.D. You can e-mail him at dave@iahc.com.

David G. Anderson, Ph.D., Executive Director

David G. Anderson, IAHC’s Executive Director, has been a partner and managing director of three health care strategy consulting firms – APM, CSC Healthcare (which acquired APM), and BDC Advisors, LLC, where he serves as Director of Planning and Development. Over 25 years, Dave has consulted with many of the largest health systems, academic medical centers, health insurers, and medical groups in the country, providing expertise in strategic planning, program development, organizational transformation, mergers, acquisitions, and a host of other top-management issues. He has also been Chief Operating Officer of a health care services provider, a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company. While at McKinsey, he managed the research for the business best-seller In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman. Dave holds MBA and PhD degrees from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a BS from Yale University. He is the author of numerous papers on strategic planning, product development, cost management, ambulatory care, organizational development, and other topics of concern to health care executives.