The Collaborative Forum

Right before Christmas, Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a prolific writer at The New Yorker who writes about the problems and challenges of modern medicine, published a book titled The Checklist Manifesto–How to get things right.

The gist of the book is that by employing simple checklists in hospitals, procedures are performed with fewer complications and patients get healthier. Gawande has been making the rounds on The Daily Show, PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer, NPR and other media outlets promoting his book and discussing the remarkable success checklists can produce. Read the rest of this entry →

Clearly, the need to reduce healthcare costs without affecting the quality of healthcare delivered is at the center of our country’s healthcare debate.  However, a recent BusinessWeek article of February 4, 2010, by Chad Terhune and Arlene Weintraub, makes the mistake of lumping together all disease management programs and then goes on to cite examples in which particular programs have demonstrated no cost-savings nor any apparent increase in the health of patients. 

That is not, however, true of all programs that aim to manage chronic disease and demonstrate reduced costs.

As a cardiologist and CEO of Pharos Innovations, a company that focuses on managing chronic disease while demonstrating real reductions in avoidable hospital admissions and overall healthcare costs for Medicaid, Medicare, the VA, commercial health plans and provider systems, I think it’s important to set the record straight. There ARE well-proven ways to reduce costs AND keep patients healthier. Read the rest of this entry →

I read an interesting article on Sunday, in The New York Times Magazine, Making Healthcare Better. The article discusses Dr. Brent James of Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare and the results that he and his team are producing with their patients. The Intermountain team has been improving healthcare and reducing costs by following treatment protocols and estimates indicate that the data-driven changes they’ve made at Intermountain have saved thousands of lives a year. In total, Intermountain has developed protocols for 50 clinical conditions, which accounts for more than half of their patients.
 
There are plenty in the medical field who are skeptical of Dr. James and his approach—and the balanced article includes them—but the results speak for themselves. In the end, what Dr. James and his team at Intermountain have done, is take a different approach to practicing medicine. They’ve looked at the way things were done, and effectively disrupted the intuitive approach to medicine. By providing protocols as a guideline, their doctors have saved thousands of lives.
 
Disruptive innovation—a theory of Clayton Christensen—discusses that the way to affect real change, is to disrupt the way things have been done. Disruptive innovation can have characteristics that traditional segments may not want (protocols vs. intuitive medicine). In fact, I founded Pharos Innovations and developed Tel-Assurance® based on Christensen’s notion of disruptive innovation. Read the rest of this entry →