George Halvorson's Perfect Health Care Plan | Big Think

George Halvorson's Perfect Health Care Plan

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The CEO of Kaiser Permanente thinks the ideal health care plan would be built around the patient. What we have now is a silent system, he says.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

George C. Halvorson:

George C. Halvorson is chairman and chief executive officer of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, headquartered in Oakland, California. Kaiser Permanente is the nation’s largest nonprofit health plan and hospital system, serving more than 8.6 million members and generating $40 billion in annual revenue.

George Halvorson serves on the Institute of Medicine Task Force on Evidence Based Care and the Commonwealth Commission for a High Performing Health System. He serves on the American Hospital Association’s Advisory Committee on Health Care Reform. He chairs the World Economic Conference Health Governors for 2009 and chairs the International Federation of Health Plans. He has received the Modern Healthcare/Health Information and Management Systems Society CEO IT Achievement Award. The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange also awarded him the 2009 Louis Sullivan Award for leadership and achievements in advancing health care quality.

Halvorson has written several health care reform books, including the newly released Health Care Will Not Reform Itself: A User’s Guide to Refocusing and Reforming American Health Care. He also wrote Health Care Reform Now!, Health Care Co-ops in Uganda, Strong Medicine, and Epidemic of Care as guidebooks for health care reform.

Halvorson served as an advisor to the governments of Uganda, Great Britain, Jamaica, and Russia on issues of health policy and financing. His strong commitment to diversity and inter-ethnic healing has led him to his current writing project, a new book about racial prejudice around the world.

Prior to joining Kaiser Permanente, Halvorson was president and chief executive officer of HealthPartners, headquartered in Minneapolis. With more than 30 years of health care management experience, he has also held several senior management positions with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What are the elements of a perfect system?

George Halvorson: A perfect system is patient-focused. It's not built around the caregivers, it's not built around opportunities, it's not built around revenue streams, it's built around the patients. The perfect system focuses on the patient. And the perfect system has all of the information about each patient so that knowledgeable caregivers working with the patient can figure out the optimal care pattern for that patient is. And if you're a healthy person and pre-diabetic, the right plan for you is to avoid diabetes. If you have diabetes and you've got co-morbidity, the right plan for you is a plan that links your caregivers and manages the complications. And everybody has different perfect outcome, everybody should have care plan. Everyone should have somebody working with them, a care team, a support team working with them to optimize their care. The perfect system can do that.

In an imperfect system, patients stumble into the Emergency Room, that’s unconnected to anything else they do, they get care for their asthma in one place and get care for their kidney failure in another place-- completed unrelated care. An imperfect system is built around the individual provider business sites and not around care. The perfect system has a data flow, has information going to the patients, has patients able to make informed choices. So, when you’ve got one hospital that has a death rate for heart disease of three or four times the next hospital over, patients should know that. There should be an informed set of choices for patients. There are huge differences in oncology outcomes. If you have stage 3 cancer, you’re likelihood of living six months is significantly different depending on the oncologist you chose. Nobody knows that. If you have a mammogram read, the accuracy of the mammogram varies significantly based on the reader. Some readers have twice as many mammograms getting to stage 3 and death as other readers. And nobody knows that. People don’t know that. So, people assume, “I had a mammogram and are protected.” The perfect system would keep track of mammogram success rates, cancer survival rates, bone surgery success rates. If you sort through the process – heart surgery success rates. And make that information part of the data flow that patients can use.

Read the full transcript at