Stefan Scholtes

Research interests

The healthcare sector, while pivotal in significantly enhancing life expectancy over the past century, currently faces a paradigm shift. Rooted in a 20th-century delivery model centred around family doctors and general hospitals, this system now confronts the challenges of the 21st century – aging populations, escalating chronic diseases, and growing health disparities. This raises a critical question: can this traditional delivery system be adapted to effectively address these modern healthcare challenges, or is it a case of preparing for yesterday’s battles in today’s war?

Professor Stefan Scholtes’ extensive experience with hospitals and primary care practices not only underscores the need for these institutions to evolve, but also reveals a critical gap in the industry: there are jobs-to-be-done that neither hospitals nor traditional primary care practices can do well. This gap urgently needs to be filled by new delivery vehicles, which are pivotal in providing innovative solutions and tech-enabled strategies to effectively tackle the growing chronic disease crisis and deliver population health outcomes at scale.

Stefan’s research is divided into 3 main streams:

• Primary Care at Scale: Since 2018, Stefan has served as Chair of the Board at Granta Medical Practices in Cambridgeshire, which has evolved into one of England’s largest primary care practices. This role provides valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges of delivering primary care on a large scale while maintaining the essential GP-patient relationship.
• Healthcare Utilities: Developed in partnership with Carter Dredge, a Cambridge Judge Business Doctorate student and senior executive in a US health system, this initiative studies and supports a structural innovation in healthcare delivery. The aim is to establish not-for-profit businesses, termed healthcare utilities, that specifically target market inefficiencies in healthcare supply chains. These utilities ensure that vital technology remains both affordable and readily available. A prime example of this model’s success is Civica Rx, a non-profit generic drug manufacturer in the US that provides over 1,500 US hospitals with essential drugs at a stable low price, focusing on medications that are frequently impacted by shortages. Stefan and Carter are working closely with Civica Rx to study the extent to which the healthcare utility business model can be applied to resolving other critical supply challenges faced by health systems and payers.
• Centre for Global Healthcare Convergence: Co-founded with Cambridge Judge Fellow Anoop Maini, this initiative aims to address fragmentation in healthcare. Working alongside industry and academic partners, the Centre is pioneering the formation of businesses named Precision Population Health Solutions. Created as clinical franchises, these ventures integrate various healthcare components to deliver effective, turn-key solutions for specific patient groups, such as asthmatics, and scale best-in-class population health outcomes.

Professor Scholtes’ research across these 3 areas is directed towards shaping a new healthcare model. This model introduces a third delivery pillar, complementing the existing GP-Hospital framework, to enhance the overall healthcare system. Currently, primary and secondary care providers are local generalists, catering to local communities and treating a large range of conditions. While this approach is vital for overall healthcare, it is not as effective for tackling specific problems that require scale. The idea is to complement the existing delivery system with an ecosystem of specialised ventures, both non-profit and for-profit. These organisations will focus on addressing specific problems on a large scale. They operate in the ‘mezzanine’ space between primary and secondary care and are designed to plug seamlessly into existing local health systems. Professor Scholtes believes this focused strategy has the potential to catalyse the step-change improvements that we desperately need, help health systems to consistently achieve best-in-class population health outcomes, and reduce health disparities. This approach is key to adapting our healthcare systems to better meet the demands of the 21st century.