The Health Transformation Alliance (HTA), a healthcare-focused cooperative comprising 50 major corporations including IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Verizon and Marriott, hosted its annual meeting on Tuesday, June 26.
I was honored to keynote the event in New Jersey and had been looking forward to it for months. I’m a firm believer that U.S. businesses, by joining together and leveraging their economic clout, will lead healthcare transformation. That is the goal of the HTA: to fix this broken system for good.
The HTA formed September 2015 in search of better care-delivery options, lower costs and greater convenience for its member organizations and their employees.
Rob E. Andrews, the association’s dynamic and visionary CEO, served 24 years in the United States House of Representatives, where he became a leading voice on healthcare issues. He now oversees one of the most sophisticated and knowledgeable groups I’ve ever had the opportunity to address.
To the CEOs and other senior leaders in the room, I focused my talk on the sizable leap it will take to get from where American healthcare is today to where it ought to be in the future.
Collectively, HTA-member corporations spend more than $25 billion a year on health coverage and benefits for more than 7 million employees. I noted that they were paying dramatically more for the medical coverage than their global competitors, with far poorer clinical outcomes. Each year, statistically, hundreds of their employees (both current and former) will die from medical error, a lack prevent care and avoidable complications from chronic disease. Nearly all will be denied the convenience of video-based care, causing delayed treatments and hundreds of thousands of lost work hours.
As healthcare experts, the people in the room were aware of the issues I raised and the troubling statistics. Like many leaders, they’re tired of American healthcare’s persistent underperformance because, to them, poor healthcare directly affects the people they rely on to run their businesses and please their customers. And, like many of our nation’s leaders, it’s easy to get discouraged at how difficult change process will be.
I left the session this week optimistic that if real change is coming to our nation’s healthcare system, members of the HTA have the focus, drive, and ability to make it happen. But it needs to happen soon. I worry more than anything that the rising cost of medical care will force our nation into a two-tier system of care—one that provides consistent access for those with private coverage and one for everyone else. Should this happen, it will be incredibly difficult to right the ship. The HTA members and the other large businesses across the United States have the power and ability to initiate and lead transformative change.
I hope they’ll join together and demand the delivery system change, before it’s too late.
Dr. Robert Pearl is the former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, the nation’s largest physician group. He’s the bestselling author of “Mistreated: Why We Think We’re Getting Good Health Care–And Why We’re Usually Wrong” and a Stanford University professor. Follow him on Twitter @RobertPearlMD.
Found the choices too limiting here.