Innovations in Care

The Administration of President Barack Obama is looking to spend $20 billion to modernize the medical records and information systems of health-care providers. As it does that, it's likely to meet with resistance from incumbent businesses that have every incentive to maintain the practices and processes that made them successful to begin with.

To succeed, say the authors of The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, Obama would do well to take a page from innovators that are already bucking the health-care system—from a maker of software that uses clinical trial data to help doctors make diagnoses more efficiently, to a Web site that rewards users for getting and staying fit.

This BusinessWeek.com slide show examines how these and other upstarts are taking an innovative approach to health care.