No More Grand Canyons in Healthcare
The massive separations between the important plateaus in Health Care delivery in the United States will be fading soon. In the movie Back To The Future, Marty Mcfly’s image on a polaroid picture is dramatically fading when the threat of his whole existence increases. If his parents don’t unite, back in high school, his existence flickers on the screen. Polaroid, incidentally, filed bankruptcy in 2001 after digital adoption, but I digress.
As the expansive canyons fade, the costs will be brought down by the empowered patient. The patient needs, information + newly engineered model + aligned incentives. That is all.
In healthcare, the constellation of many critically important stars have to orbit in a sustainable energy field. Trying to enumerate them would be a second digression. So I shall spare you this one. But it is important to emphasize that very charged personal, individual, financial, economic, political stargazing has been going on for the recent few years.
The faster the canyons disappear the sooner valuable resources will be spared the current inefficient model.
Forced evolvement and recent M&A’s are indicative of the unsustainable legacy model regardless of the good intentions. It is attempting to go against the constellation order and is not natural. Forced evolution is just as unsustainable no matter how well intended, well funded, backed by force, decree or finance. Billions have been exhausted in the last four years experimenting with models that delivered less than desired outcomes even after IPO’s.
Natural evolution in healthcare is empowered by two incomprehensibly powerful field forces: individual human as well as group and collective Health and Wealth.
Natural evolution is starting to take shape in many small, underfunded, not yet digitalized, disconnected and remotely distant parts of the same constellations. Part of the natural evolutionary process is the inherent attracting energy forces even when the parts being drawn closer are unaware of such gravitation.
In paraphrasing W.H. Auden: We would rather be ruined than changed. We all have defense mechanisms to ensure that the world stays the way we expect it to be. Folks, it is not folklore any more. Current neuroscience confirmed these facts. David Rock’s books, “Your Brain At Work” and “Quiet Leadership” both explain.
New alliances are now created that were unthinkable a few years ago. Enter the age of individual empowerment. In his latest book, “The Only Game In Town”, Mr. Mohamed El-Erian eloquently simplifies economics for the average of us and clearly why the economic T juncture is coming.
In healthcare, the current road with an approaching dead end was visible to many colleagues two plus years ago. Accusations of insanity and ridicule were the results. I was a believer before I was aware. Some may call it faith. It is better explained as “Effectual Entrepreneurship” as published by Stuart Reed, Saras Sarasvathy et al.
In recent weeks, and on an extremely small scale, the grand canyons were removed in our beta testing of our model. DHD and Ocean Surgery Center with the collaborative efforts of many have made the revelation real! Scaling, although it will be pursued, is not my specialty. Taking care of people’s health with quality, dignity and a known price is.