Boca Benefits Consulting Group Inc.

In her 10/20/2008 MarketWatch blog post entitled “Mapping the future of health-care deliveryt” Kristen Gerencher writes that at a recent meeting sponsored by the Innovative Learning Network “About 70 people were mapping out what health-care delivery would look and feel like 20 years from now, and they were doing it with colorful markers …”, etc. I felt somewhat inadequate after reading Ms. Gerencher’s description of that forum. My participation at a March 2004 week-long gathering of 40 extremely bright health care leaders in Cambridge, Massachusetts entitled “Skills for the New World of Health Care” was co-sponsored by the Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health, the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Division of Health Policy Research and Education. Over an intense, long, and frenzied Sunday to Friday schedule we never got to play with any of the toys Ms. Gerencher indicates were put forth as the future direction of health care delivery. In fact, I never even saw any. If indeed toys are the future of health care delivery, then the rarefied Harvard environment did not properly balance the multi-thousand dollar cost of the experience (n.b., I too went to Cambridge seeking a glimpse of the future of health care). In addition to feeling somewhat inadequate now, I  may also be feeling somewhat gipped! Clearly the Innovative Learning Network has a better view than what we could see each day from the inside of the JFK School of Government classroom in which we met. If we had known, we could have given the experts who spoke to us each day some degree of warning and they could have tempered their comments to coincide more closely with the new gadget reality. Sadly, most of our speakers were still concerned with the fundamentals of health care delivery, the blocking and tackling if you will, and with one exception who pointed to the use of “best practice” algorithms being resident on PDA’s which could then be used by non-MD’s, we just didn’t hear much about toys at all.

Rather than make this post longer than it needs to be, I will make it just an introduction to later posts about the discussion of the issues and how 40 bright people struggled to define them and devise proposed solutions. The message is not the answers that were developed but how difficult concensus can be when the perception of every stakeholder is radically skewed in one direction or another.  We had a week to solve “the problem” with America’s health care delivery system. Friday was D-Day with a presentation by small work groups before the faculty. On Wednesday my group was still fighting. Thursday was compromise day. On Friday we delivered an incredibly cogent argument for our position. At least we thought so!