Health care representatives from seven counties in Central Texas gathered Sept. 16 to discuss ideas to better engage patients and provide more personal care.
Central Health's Learning Collaborative was hosted at the Marriott Austin South hotel to provide updates on health care initiatives occurring in Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Fayette, Lee and Travis counties. The event also included a panel discussion on ideas to improve health care delivery in Central Texas.
Dr. Clay Johnston, inaugural dean for the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas, addressed creating an adaptive health care system focused on patients rather than on the number of procedures or doctor visits.
The health care system, he said, is too complex for patients to navigate. Examples include patients not being able to easily communicate via email with their doctors, the increasing cost of care and shorter doctor visits.
"This is not a system that we should feel proud of," he said. "It's nearly impossible to find a doctor. It's way easier to find a great restaurant [to go to] tonight than it is to find a doctor. You have no idea whether [he or she] is a good doctor. Even for me—I should be able to navigate this system. It shouldn't be that hard."
Doctors should be more focused on promoting health through preventive care rather than treating the sick, he said. To make the health care delivery system more personal, community involvement and increased innovation are necessary.
"[The health care system] is invested strongly in the delivery status quo because of how it is built on the fee for service model," he said. "That means we do more rather than try to do things better."
Johnston highlighted the Caring Wisely Program, an initiative he spearheaded at the University of California–San Francisco, where he was the former associate vice chancellor of research. Caring Wisely researched inefficiencies and encouraged cultural change in the health care industry by using crowdsourcing to find solutions to improving the system and soliciting ideas from the community. Johnston and the UCSF team sifted through the ideas and chose three to implement.
Caring Wisely initiatives included making some treatments less invasive. A pharmacist converted some medications typically given intravenously to be given by mouth. Johnston said 93 percent of patients preferred this method.
"It led to some dramatic increases in unnecessary costs," he said.
Johnston said he plans to apply the Caring Wisely Program approach to how the Dell Medical School will serve the community.
"The current health care system is horribly dysfunctional," he said. "Opportunities for transformation definitely exist. Education is a fundamental way we can change this. Ultimately we've got to not just be focused on the individual [health care initiative] projects. We need to create an ecosystem in which the barriers to create a new project are much lower."
