Las Vegas looked like the center of the healthcare universe today as it played host to the annual HLTH conference. HLTH is the largest and most important event for health innovation and technological change, drawing 6,000+ attendees from the insurance, pharma and startup worlds.
I was honored to accept the invitation of Arundhati Parmar, editor-in-chief of MedCity News, to present the opening-day keynote. Under Arundhati’s leadership, MedCity has become the leading online news source for the business of innovation in healthcare. The publication combines breaking news and analysis on startups with insights into established industry leaders and policy implications. MedCity also hosts multiple conferences each year on new technologies and payment reform.
As such, the opening day of HLTH proved to be the perfect forum to address the shortcomings of the current healthcare system in a presentation titled “What Happens If We Fail to Change?”
Arundhati began with a personal story that moved many in the audience to tears. She talked about her brother, who died from kidney cancer. Today, she said, is his birthday. She told the audience about how various doctors and hospitals failed to coordinate her brother’s care. She spoke of the insurance company that delayed authorizing radiation therapy, which would have alleviated his pain from the metastatic spread to his ribs. And she told us of the health plan’s refusal to pay for the final ambulance trip to the hospital since the transportation company was out-of-network.
Day after day, patients and their families experience the unnecessary frustrations and heartaches of American healthcare. So, there’s a simple answer to the question, “What happens if we fail to change?” Disruption will happen, and current healthcare providers will lament their decision not to have embraced change sooner.
In my remarks, I built on the message Arundhati shared, highlighting the negative consequences of today’s healthcare system—not only for patients, but also doctors, as well.
National surveys of physicians find burnout affects 44% of doctors today, double the frequency of Americans overall. Despite all the medical profession has to offer, as many as one in four doctors are experiencing suicidal thoughts. Physician suicide is now a growing reality that now threatens every hospital and medical group in the United States. Every year, more than 400 doctors kill themselves, making doctors twice as likely to die from suicide than the general U.S. population.
In response to these troubling statistics, there’s another simple answer to the question, “What happens if we fail to change?” And that is: Failure is not an option.
Doctors must work together to improve healthcare quality, lower costs and deliver a level of service and convenience that patients have come to expect from every other industry. And doctors must do this not just to improve the health and well-being of those they serve.
They must do it in order to rediscover and reclaim the mission of medicine—something that has gone missing in recent years. Once a respected profession, and for most a calling, medicine has become just a job for many—one that 60% of doctors wouldn’t recommend as a career. The twenty-first century ought to be the Golden Age of physician fulfillment, not its nadir.
To fix the whole of healthcare, we must start with these two broken pieces:
- Healthcare reimbursement must transition from fee-for-service (pay for volume) to capitation (pay for value). Capitation enables superior outcomes because it aligns the needs of the patients with the priorities of doctors and hospitals.
- We must also modernize our approach to technology. Today, the availability of telehealth (email and video) and the use of data analytics and AI are marginal. This will need to change in order to improve clinical outcomes and reduce costs.
The final thought on our failure to change healthcare so far is this: Disruption has already begun through Haven (the nonprofit healthcare venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase), along with large self-funded employers and off-shore innovators (read about that here). The clock is ticking.
Of the 100+ companies and industries that I have examined in my role on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, nearly all that were as inefficient and inconvenient as healthcare, at some point, got disrupted.
I invited those in the audience to join Arundhati and me in making change happen so we can put an end to stories like those of her brother, and so we can finally make American healthcare once again the best in the world.
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 and sign up for his free monthly newsletter.
