Finding the True Meaning of Value in Healthcare
In her book, Halee Fischer-Wright says there has been misguided efforts to define value in healthcare and it needs to be re-examined.
Welcome to the latest edition of the Physicians Practice Pearls Podcast. In this podcast, we'll bring you some of the most interesting and influential guests in healthcare. If you have any ideas for podcast guests or topics, email us at editor@physicianspractice.com.
We're picking up where we left off with Halee Fischer-Wright, MD, president of the Medical Group Management Association, in this edition of the Physicians Practice Pearls Podcast. Fischer-Wright recently wrote a book, "Back to Balance" which opined that healthcare needs the three elements of medicine - art, science, and business - to w
ork most effectively.
In part one of our conversation, Fischer-Wright talked to us about the lost humanity of medicine, George Clooney, and her own flirtation with medical bill-induced bankruptcy. In part two of our conversation, she talks about the high cost of managing and reporting quality measures, specifically what it will take for providers to be able to successfully track quality in a value-based environment.
"Clearly reporting quality...is not yielding the outcomes we want. We have to ask ourselves a very fundamental question: What is value? I'm not talking about the business school [definition]…what do we really value? What is valuable to us as a physician, us as a practice, and us as a patient? That's the outcome we want. Then we need to work backwards to say what are the processes, protocols, the things we need to do to achieve those goals," she says.
Fischer-Wright also talks about Women's Health Associates in Portland, Ore. and how they learned the hard way about what patients want. She also offers some main takeaways from her book and some overarching advice for practices looking to achieve balance. "There has never been a time in the history modern practice….that we have [this kind of opportunity] to create our future. People in medical practice aren't victims, we're actually empowered to make the changes we want and our patients want, to make ourselves and our patients happier," she says.
Click above to play part one of the podcast.
Financial clearance, patient advocacy, and the effects of the pandemic on revenue cycle management
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