Patient-centered Care – Let citizens manage their health
December 21, 2008
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 the whole post.
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