Focusing on expanding health care access is a very noble social goal. But in a fiscally conservative leaning country plagued by debt and recession, access driven models are not winning strategic arguments for passing legislation, winning elections, or garnering public opinion.
What seems to be a missing element from today’s dialogue on health care reform, is how enabling health technologies can have an important impact on opportunities to embolden existing stakeholders, create new jobs, and stimulate the grow of small businesses to reduce costs and improve quality of care.
Integrating responsible "demand side" consumer driven empowerment models,
implementing sensible comparative effectiveness components within the USFDA
regulatory approval processes, and reducing the cost of medical education for newly minted MD’s will help to usher in a "new new" beginning of impactful health reform, quality improvement, and cost containment strategies.
There are no easy answers or shotgun solutions.
A key will be the "Chutzpah" or courage to continually adopt incentives and test new payment
models that help drive innovation at the state or local levels. These new models can help break the chain of established "practices and habits" that create inefficiencies, drive up costs, and provide disincentive for quality improvement.
These seeds of innovation can be planted in a range of activities that include prevention programs, chronic disease management, and long-term care. Having the frameworks in place at the state, community, or organizational levels to reward new ideas, reject broken parts, and adopt the most innovative practices is a critical component of sustaining and driving a bold vision for health care we can believe in during 2010 and beyond.
As our friend Machiavelli has said the hardest thing to do is create a new order of things!
........or thinking more optimistically and emphatically, Dr. Seuss would say, "Oh, the places we will go....!!!
