Medullan was honored to be able to be a sponsor to the Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009 that was held at the Boston Seaport Hotel on February 26, 2009. We joined with organizer HIL Forum and other healthcare IT companies and organizations from both the public and private sector.
The Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009 was a well attended event where many ideas were heard and explored. It was well moderated by Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe, with input from Peter Mueller, Valerie Fleishman, and Anne Marie Biernacki. The summit was a successful exchange of ideas about problems and possibilities for solutions.
We’ll be updating regularly from the Transforming Healthcare Summit, co-sponsored by Medullan at the Seaport Hotel in Boston tonight. Start checking for updates around 5:30PM.
Touring the Boston Medical Center yesterday, what stood out most was the human dimension in the delivery of care that is not easily understood through statistics. While it was impressive that more than 130,000 patients a year are seen in the emergency room, or that 1,600 families a month depend on the food pantry, or that more than 400 prescriptions a month are filled in the free pharmacy – many for chronic diseases, it is only in seeing the experiences that patients and providers go through that one can paint a complete picture of the work done at the BMC.
Software services in health care are challenged by an incentive model which lacks any ability to encourage participation by physicians, leaving Software as a Service vendors in HIT without a willing and necessary participant in the market. The solution might be for HIT firms to employ physicians themselves.
With many health conditions (particularly outside disease management efforts), there’s a lack of a single coordinator of care. There’s been no tool that allowed the patient – the person most motivated to drive overall care coordination – to play this role, and no one else has stepped into the vacuum. One of the key areas of potential for collaborative networking/care management tools is that the patient may finally ascend to their rightful place in the overall coordination of their own care.
There are a huge number of people and organizations trying to solve the healthcare challenge. You can’t keep looking for the one, perfect solution – instead we must embrace a model of incremental and focused change.