VibrantHealth - Fixing health care in America in three years.

Focus on OUTCOMES, not procedures. Health care reform for HEALTH

"Health Care Reform Now ! " was written by George Halvorson, the CEO of Kaiser Health Plan. He undersstands the problems, especially where incentives to the health care providers encourage inefficient and ineffective care. He suggests a method for introducing another participant into the process between the payers and the providers to do two main things. They will insist on the providers using an electronic system to request payment, a single consistent system which creates an electronic medical record for each patient and records actual outcomes.

The outcome data is currently missing so neither providers nor patients nor even payers can compare the results obtained by different providers whether primary care doctors, specialists, hospitals, or health care plans. When we can tell what outcomes are achieved, everybody can make better choices and better outcomes will naturally follow. Evertybody will insist on it. When our hospital kills twice as many mothers in childbirth as the next one, we WILL want to change what we are doing in pre-natal care and deliveries. Count on it. The payers who reimburse the providerswill care. The companies who pay the premiums will care. The patients who use the services will care.

We are currently paying twice what other developed nations pay for health care, and yet we suffer much worse health care results. We require emergency rooms to take every desparately sick patient who shows up, but we do nothing to help that person avoid becoming desparately sick. Sometimes we do no prevention even when the patient is insured. There are no payment codes for providing a patient advice which will prevent a hospitalisation in the future. We don't pay for that, so we don't get that. When we eventually bring the uninsured into the system, and we repair the system so it encourages prevention, we will fix many problems. Our health will improve. Our costs will go down. We won't need so many clerks paid to deny claims.