Joe Flower's Healthcare Topics:
How We Can Drive Down Real Costs in Health Care
The emerging future of health care shows definite and startling features: Far beyond merely “bending the cost curve” of health care inflation, various organizations across the country are showing how to actually drive the cost down by substantial amounts, without depriving anyone of anything. What is emerging from the private sector is a coherent collaborative strategy. Flower shows how it works and how to make it work, with clear examples, models, and parameters.
Where We're Really Headed: Health Care 2020 and Beyond
The trends, vectors, and forces that are rapidly re-shaping health care are far deeper and broader than what is written into the health care reform act. Within a decade the structure, economics, legal position, and technological underpinnings of health care will be nearly unrecognizable. The organizations that thrive in these changes will be the organizations that best understand, anticipate, and build for them.
Facing The Physician Crisis
More than half of our current physicians intend to retire or cut back their practices at the very time that 30 to 40 million new people are entering the system, and the Baby Boom is entering its years of “peak medicine.” The necessity of producing more doctors, and emphasizing primary care, is obvious, but the real answer is far larger. Helping doctors become more efficient and effective could in effect greatly increase the number of available doctors and the time they have to give to patients, and restructuring and re-thinking how we do much of health care (particularly chronic care) could make the whole process far more effective and efficient -- and far less expensive.
Nurses: A Key To Better Faster Cheaper Health Care
We now actually have considerable experience, data, examples, and outcomes of pilots that show exactly how to provide better health care, for less, for everyone. They have a number of factors in common, such as much more emphasis on primary care, prevention, and chronic care; teamwork; tight control of processes; and partnering with patients. All of these clearly illuminate making far better use of nurses - at the very moment that we are losing nurses out of direct patient care every day. Nurses are key to a better future. Let's take a look at how that works.
The End of Health Care As We Know It: Techniques, Technologies, and Treatments
New technologies, pharmaceuticals, and methods of treatment will over the coming decade short-circuit much of today’s medical care, replacing it with cheaper, easier, more precise, more effective techniques that will produce startling changes in health care.
Data-Driven Health Care: Better Faster Cheaper
For the first time, we have the potential to use real data to drive the effectiveness of health care. But large practical obstacles bar the way. We can’t get there from here without specific action and real leadership from across the industry.
The Next Health Care: Talks For Specific Industry Sectors
Flower regularly brings his analysis of the future to specific industry sectors and stakeholders, such as:
• Hospitals, health care systems, and hospital associations
• Clinics and clinic associations
• Physician groups and other professional associations
• Behavioral health
• Long-term care and hospice
• Pharmacies
• Pharmaceutical companies
• Health care financial managers
• Health plans and managed care
• Major vendors
• Employers
• Investors
For each of these sectors, Flower unpacks the unfolding changes engulfing health care, and illustrates precisely how those trends and forces will re-shape the sector, re-define their part of the industry, will shift their goals, their finances, their strategies, and their effectiveness.
About Joe Flower:
Joe Flower relates, "talk to people about healthcare - in fact, next time you sit down with a stranger on a plane or at a party, pretend you're me. Tell them your specialty is the future of healthcare. Then brace yourself. People are bitter, defeated, frightened, enraged - even people in the healthcare industry.
I would be surprised if you haven't felt the frustration yourself - in your business, in your own life, and in dealing with your family's healthcare.
The big secret is: Healthcare is already changing. There's a movement in healthcare that hasn't yet recognized itself as a movement. You have to know where to look.
While the public discussion is all about whether we can lower the rate of healthcare inflation a few points, whether we can cobble together some minimal insurance for everyone, a few healthcare insiders are starting to see and experiment with ways to cut the cost of healthcare deeply while delivering higher quality!"
The problem is that very few of those insiders who know this can articulate the issue so the average listener can "get it." Joe Flower is one of those insiders - a nearly-30-year veteran of the industry. Every employer and employee is feeling the effects of rising healthcare costs and diminishing coverage. Few issues effect so many, so strongly.
He continues, "people need to know, in this historic moment, that now we can change healthcare, because finally we have the technology to tell us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong.
A mounting range of factors are pushing healthcare toward deep change. New management techniques - plus new digital data that finally allows managers to really see into their organizations - are allowing organizations to make those deep changes as never before."
It's not about money. We are already spending plenty, in fact far more than we need to. It's about asking the right questions, getting the right answers and spending our money on what works. It's about changing the model - the way other industries have done."
Joe has clear answers that everyone can understand. Some speakers talk about numbers, some focus on technology, some are academics, some are consultants. Joe is a big picture person who communicates with passion and 30 years of credibility.