Potent Medicine, The Collaborative Cure for Healthcare, by John Toussaint, MD with Emily Adams, ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value 2012
We are at the earlier stages of healthcare industry reform, which means that the opportunities are everywhere. But where to begin?
Dr. John Toussaint made history with work creating ThedaCare, a five-hospital system in northeastern Wisconsin. As CEO Emeritus, Toussaint showed the power of collaborative healthcare networks in reducing costs and changing the way we deliver patient care.
This second book, Potent Medicine, goes beyond many of the initial successes, just as manufacturing applied JIT and Kaizen thirty years ago, to remake manufacturing. But we’re not building cars here, and readers will have to make a little shift from shop floor techniques to understanding what happens when human product finds itself moving through assembly lines and rework centers, not always headed for a happy conclusion.
Toussaint knows enough about Japanese and American production techniques to understand how and which tools to apply. What is most important, however, about his revolutionary work, is how he focuses on two key deliverables:
1. Payment reform
2. Transparency of provider performance data
When he speaks about transparency, the word takes worlds of meaning beyond our common day-to-day usage. “True transparency, “he says, “means plain speaking – using words like death and risk and error that cause allergic reactions in both doctors and administrators. A patience evaluating a hospital for impending heart surgery for instance needs to see a few simple measures of quality, such as:
· The number of medical errors committed at the hospital yesterday, shown both as a number and as an historical trend line
· Number of surgical infections last month, and as a trend
· Number of people that come in with chest pains and die
· Percentage of people requiring his particular surgery who die in hospital, ad how many die within six months
· Average days to full recovery.
The story of Nancy, a former teacher whose hospital experience started out bad – “to him (the doctor) I was just a knee)," got worse, and finally got better, exemplifies so much of what Toussaint wants fixed. In fact, Toussaint believes that the system actually works against itself.
Payments and information flows
Once a patient enters the typical healthcare facility, multiple information flows, billings and costs become difficult to decipher, or manage. Again Toussaint offers solutions for these very complicated problems that contribute to the 17% factor. This book reveals eye-opening accounts from the physicians and system leaders who stood on the frontlines during the development of Wisconsin's most innovative healthcare organizations, and from the patients they're trying to help. Potent Medicine shares the insights and tools that leaders need to not only anticipate and adapt to that change, but to drive it. The book is a call to action for all stakeholders to collaborate: physicians, consumers, insurers, employers, healthcare leaders, and policy makers across the nation to join together and participate in ongoing experiments to transform our nation's healthcare system. Read about the proven methods that will get us to higher quality and better value in healthcare.
***