Conferences

One Take on the Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009

The Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009 was a very interesting discussion and networking event that took place behind a timely backdrop of healthcare reform being identified as one of the top three priorities for the administration. There were a wide variety of attendees that included health insurance organizations, entrepreneurs with ideas, lawyers specializing in healthcare, health IT firms, marketing firms, competitive business intelligence consultants, management consultants, and venture capital firms, medical device manufacturing consortiums, physicians, and most importantly patients. I even met an entrepreneur who has been in business since April 2008 and flew in from LA. In winter I should add.

Everyone came with something important to contribute to the summit and with a mission to take away new perspectives as well. The networking before the night’s speakers and the panel was a good time to meet people and share expectations about the event. Most revealing for me was how connected so many industries are to healthcare. It is reflective of the relative size of healthcare expenditure in the GDP.

Steve Wardell, the head of the HILForum, which organized the event, started his talk with some level setting. By doing a quick poll, he demonstrated that most of the people at the symposium work towards improvement in treatment outcomes for patients and also to reduce the costs associated with healthcare. There is a lot more to gain for everyone involved if these two goals, which are not mutually exclusive, are kept in clear focus. This was the best start for what is almost always a heated debate. I say almost because despite the few points of contention that came up, there was a general consensus in what needed to be done and where most of the waste in health care delivery was happening. There was also widespread acknowledgment of what has been working well – social networking amongst patients – through little or no industry help at all.

One observation as to the biggest problem that needed to be corrected was that Medicare, as it exists today, has inadvertently rewarded specialization for physicians and has discouraged the practice of primary care. Where the population of physicians was about evenly split about 50/50 forty or so years ago, it is now heavily skewed towards specialists and away from primary care practitioners. Charlie Baker of Harvard Pilgrim also made the point that this skewing had taken place gradually but consistently and that undoing this change might also have to happen at this pace. The correction to the rewards and incentives to improve what providers did was a generally agreed-up point.

Another panelist, Jonathan Bush of Athena Health, dramatically made the point that there is a need for pragmatism in addressing health care cost issues, and that without it, the result may be passing along the burden of high costs of healthcare to the generations to come. Both Charlie and Jonathan believe that incremental changes were happening in the right direction and that incentives were helping and would continue to help. The health IT budget in the stimulus was one big incentive, that might trigger the flow of health data which could then be measured by the right authorities, both private and public, in order to improve quality, determine comparative effectiveness, and reduce costs. There was general agreement on this point as well.

A physician in the audience raised the point that she spent a significant amount of time trying to determine if her patients were being compliant with their prescriptions for recovery after being discharged, and that if this time could be saved by making it easier for her to follow up on her discharged patients, it would be worth spending the additional time to use electronic prescription systems (ePrescriptions) as opposed to continuing to write them by hand.

The other panelists were John Glaser and James Roosevelt of Partners Healthcare and Tufts Health Plan respectively. They contributed a wealth of perspective and balance to the issues as well. James Roosevelt was the keynote speaker and his message was that all stakeholders needed to be ready for compromise in order to accomplish change. John Glaser touched on an item that everyone agreed on – what does “meaningful use” mean? It is language included in the recently passed bill that is the qualification for a medical practice to receive some of the stimulus funds, but the exact definition of what that is still has to be clarified. Jonathan Bush made the point that everyone was contemplating – that “meaningful use” will be different for providers, insurers, and patients.

A patient named Dave also brought into perspective another dimension into the conversation when he asked about what was fair for patients who had rare enough conditions that did not attract the industry to accommodate their needs to improved flow of information. A panelist thought that even though a company may be more incentivized to target a larger potential pool of consumers than a smaller pool that might have a rare condition, it might be that through improvements targeted at a larger pool of consumers, a smaller but different group could benefit as well. These would be incremental changes in the right direction.

There were also many ideas from entrepreneurs which were more optimistic in the accomplishment of major impacts, even if from seemingly small and minimally disruptive changes in the delivery of care. David Williams logged perspectives from several CEO’s on his blog. Among those pushing innovation, there remains optimism that big changes can happen fairly quickly if the right solution were matched to the right opportunity.

Tags: Company, Health IT, Healthcare, Healthcare Summit, HIT, Incremental Change, Summit, Technology Summit

I am 5 foot, 11.75 inches tall; I enjoy helping clients and people I work with to achieve their objectives; believe that technology is a great enabler for the improved delivery of health care in the world, as it can be for so many other things.