Buurtzorg (B): Driving Innovation in Health Care with a New Organizational Paradigm

This case describes how Jos de Blok, CEO of Buurtzorg, a non-profit home healthcare provider in Holland, radically overhauled home care delivery in Holland. He believed in giving responsibility back to those who knew the job best: nurses. He created an organization without managers or hierarchy, which put the patient at the centre and was based upon the concept of self-managed teams. Case A introduces the history and problems of home care delivery in the Netherlands, and the solution proposed by de Blok – self-managed teams of nurses. Case (B) describes how he structured the organization and its subsequent performance.

To makes the student think about how they would organize a firm based on self-managed teams, without managers or hierarchies. Case A introduces the problem of home care delivery in the Netherlands and ends discussing the goal of de Blok which is to create teams of nurses that are self-managed. After reading Case (A) students should be able to design the broad strokes of an organization that has self-managed teams and the core. That is they should be able to “design” the organization’s incentives, hiring practices, infrastructure of communication across teams, etc. : all the necessary pieces to make this system work. Case (B) describes how de Blok structured the organization and its performance.