True Healthcare Reform – Are the Right People asking the Right Questions?

Breakthroughs come from a relenting and disciplined approach to unbiased discovery in relation to a certain vision, goal and hypothesis. Just as how you frame the problem influences the end result, the questions you ask and the people asking the questions bias your outcome.

In writing Healthcare Letter to Americans, I wanted to share examples of questions that I believe could shape a very different approach to reform and more importantly the dialogue that we are having about such reform.

This list represents a sample. Please feel free to add to this by contacting me. I will update with new questions every week.

• How do we measure value in healthcare?
• What things could we do now with relatively little costs that would improve efficiency?
• How do consumers want to receive their care? (Place, time, hours, etc.)?
• What is the #1 barrier to effectively practice of medicine from a healthcare providers perspective? How do we break down that problem into manageable pieces?

• What is the #1 concern about the healthcare for those who currently have a plan?
• What are barriers to consumers directly purchasing their own healthcare insurance?
• What lessons have we learned from Massachusetts in enacting the first state based major healthcare reform?
• Why do we have health insurance state-based? What do you gain from this? What do we lose?
• What industries have we been successful at maintaining a reasonable return on investment (profit) in healthcare well benefitting the other stakeholders (employees, consumers, physicians)?
• What is considered reasonable profit?
• What impact does non-profit status have on our healthcare providers? What behaviors does it drive that are good and not good?
• Why do consumers repeat behaviors that impact their health negatively? What efforts or incentives have been successful at reversing that trend?
• How is education linked to poor health outcomes or not?
• What healthcare outcomes are we good at as a nation?
• How do we prevent bureaucracy from hampering innovation? What lessons can we learn from organizations that seem to serve the consumer best? Large and small? What industries are we great at in the US – why is that and what can we learn from them?
• What disease outcomes are other countries good at?
• What have been the biggest breakthroughs in healthcare – small and large – what were conditions that allowed that to happen? How do we measure value in healthcare?
• Why do patients believe communication is as important as a doctor’s clinical expertise or ability? How does that shape healthcare training?
• What pockets of excellence exists in each of our healthcare segments?
• The government currently provides healthcare for our veterans through the VA – what can we learn from that experience?
• When we have seen fraud and abuse in our healthcare system, what were the conditions that allowed it to succeed or begin?
• What the original purpose of Medicare? Have we moved beyond that? Why?
• How does Medicare serve its population well? How does it not? How is effective at controlling costs and how is it not?