Patient-centered Care - Let citizens manage their health

In a well-written post about the problem with healthcare, Dr. Kenneth H. Cohn talks about his recent personal experience with a medical problem while he was between PCPs. Sounds like a nightmare but that's what too much of healthcare is today. Specifically, he identifies these problems as presented by the Health Finance Forum:

• The (non)-system does not encourage social benefit, such as access to care.

• It does not reward wellness or high-quality care.

• It creates financial instability by adding cost and complexity to health administration, rewarding high-cost practices and focusing on expensive sickness-focused interventions rather than wellness.

He suggests some solutions:

• Stop the insurance company micromanagement; it adds not only cost and complexity

• Let citizens manage their health with their physicians through a variety of channels, such as website interactions that do not force us to drive to our doctor’s office for prescriptions when we are in acute pain and know what we need to do to recover.

• Design systems using interdependent, rather than fragmented, processes, that improve patients’ healthcare outcomes, rather than tolerating arbitrary rules that exist for the convenience of insurers.

Great ideas - read teh whol post.

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Comments

  • 12/21/2008 12:29 PM Deborah Leyva wrote:
    Excellent post. Thank you for sharing. It's time to get serious about patient autonomy and improvements to the healthcare delivery process. Actually, we should have done something before now, but it's never to late to start.
    Reply to this
  • 12/22/2008 8:43 AM Ken Cohn wrote:
    Thanks John,

    I appreciate your comments and have added a link to your eHealth blog on my blogsite

    Happy holidays
    ken
    Reply to this
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