On May 10, 2008, I attended the Massachusetts Medical Society Annual Meeting. This society is for physicians and medical students only. I was able to attend as a non-member and it was quite an eye-opener to hear about the Physician perspective on very complex problems that we have today in Healthcare, namely electronic/personal medical records (EMR), healthcare for all platforms in the 2008 Presidential campaign, debatable under payment of physicians for their services, and feeling of loss of control by physicians to practice medicine due to metrics that need to be met coming from all directions.
The start of the day included presentations of studies around how to engage members to contribute to improving their overall health, with examples from obesity management, smoking cessation and making sure patients with chronic conditions continue to take their medications to prevent an episode. The premise is that patients know what is healthy and not healthy, but that alone does not drive them to healthy behaviors. However, incentives can influence people to healthy behaviors. The studies' findings indicated short-term successes in offering patients money, opportunity to win money via lottery and patient contracts where patient sets aside money that they can only earn back if their health goals are met. Other study findings also showed a relationship in economics to health, such as making healthy foods more affordable can influence patients to eat healthy; currently, fast food is cheap and convenient, so more of it is consumed by the public.
The one thing I immediately noticed when I entered the meeting hall is that most of the attendees were older physicians near retirement. There was a plee by one of the speakers asking physicians to engage in developing IT in healthcare. It seemed like the audience agreed with its importance, since the session ended with a lot of positive energy in the room. I was disappointed that there were not more younger physicians in the room because I feel these younger physicians that grew up in the computer-age will be instrumental in more seemlessly bringing technology to Healthcare. So I wanted to see their participation so that they can be motivated by this energy.
The second big event of the day was a large panel of Healthcare experts, including Health Plan senior executives, a Senator, Physician Group senior executives, a Journalist, etc. This panel discussed questions such as:
-Will health care-for-all solve any problems?
-Is it more important to pay providers closer to what they believe is reasonable or is it more important to lower the costs to the patients considering those patients that already spend a large portion of their paycheck on health insurance?
-What is the root of the problem in the skyrocketing price of health care?
-Is technology worth the investment?
All great experts in the industry, all great questions, yet even with such a powerful and knowledgable panel, there was no agreement on the answers to any of these questions. As one speaker put it, there is an IN bin, OUT bin and a HARD bin that is left on the side. These all go in the HARD bin.
Though there was a lot of disagreement on how we fix these healthcare issues and there was no good resolutions, one thing that was clear from this meetings was that these Physicians that shared their stories of going to Medical School with the dreams of caring for and helping people in need, continue to live out this dream. Every Physician that spoke about patients made it very clear that they entered the profession concerned with the member's health first and they spoke with conviction stating that they have not changed that purpose after all their years of practice. Even though it seemed that some of these Physicians were truly underpaid and overworked, they managed to keep the patients' interests above their own. This completed my day with a new sense of respect for the physician community.
