PORTLAND, ME – In healthcare, one-size-fits-all doesn’t have to be the national model for holding down costs and offering high quality care said speakers at “Building a World-Class System: Better Business, Better Health.” The one-day conference held last week in Portland, Maine, was sponsored by the Maine Health Management Coalition, a nonprofit advocate for healthcare quality measurement and reporting.
“All over America, you find low cost, good quality healthcare,” said T.R. Reid, one of the speakers. Reid is a documentary filmmaker and author of the book, “The Healing of America.”
Reid noted that his upcoming PBS documentary, “U.S. Health Care: The Good News,” to be released early in 2012, showcases some communities in the U.S. that are achieving low-cost, high-quality care. What is notable about those communities is that each does things their own way. “It really doesn’t matter how you set up your model,” Reid said.
But what does matter, said Reid and other speakers, is that people work together.
Working together means everything from hospitals and doctors collaborating to patients and doctors communicating to health plans working with employers to patients putting pressure on their healthcare providers, employers and local and federal governments.
“We don’t have to wait for Washington to do it for us. Washington won’t,” said Reid. “It’s up to us to get this done.”
The speakers offered a number of examples and suggestions for getting it done, including:
• Keeping people well: Managing chronic conditions without hospitalization and offering employee wellness programs.
• Collecting data and using that data for analysis.
• Changing the culture of healthcare.
• Reducing hospital re-admissions and errors.
• Reforming payment models.
All of the above-mentioned things will impact the business of healthcare, said Harold Miller, the executive director of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform and the president and chief executive officer of the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement. Hospitals will have lower revenues and some may even close, but communities have the power to figure out how to make things work to benefit all stakeholders in their specific community, he said.
“Fundamentally, it’s about economic development in the community,” Miller said. “The places that get this right will be magnets for economic development.”
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.
