The Bankers Destroyed Healthcare

by Cancergeek

The big issue with Healthcare today is that it is ran as a business. As one of my good friends has said before,

When bankers get into business they usually destroy it. ~Henry Ford

This is the fundamental problem with the majority of healthcare. The bankers, the accountants, and the MBA have pushed out many of the physician leaders and turned it into a business.

A business based on the volume of patients you see and not the value you produce for your patients. Or the value you produce for your community.

The disconnect between those that produce the care and those that count the beans has only been increasing.

While focusing on metrics of success such as operational effeciency, asset utilization, and process improvement the board room sounds more like a manufacturing floor than it does one caring for people as patients.

We need to ask ourselves if we want to really create a world focused on the patient, then why the hell are we using words that focus on manufacturing care?

Words that resemble automation, robotics, and assembly versus words focusing on listening, humans, and empathy.

We decentivize our physicians from spending too much time with any single patient. We discourage radiologists from calling referring physicians and acting as a consultant to get the right test for the right patient at the right time. We force physicians to keep their heads down, eyes on the screen, and fingers tapping the keyboard instead of allowing them to care for their patients.

We can refer to them as bankers entering the C-Suite, but they are writers.

They have chosen their words, to tell a story, that impacts our lives as patients.

Unfortunately the journey most of us want to go on as a patient doesn’t align with the service that delivers our healthcare trip.

Healthcare’s leadership has written a story that has decreased the time spent with patients, taken away the trust between physician and patient, eliminated price, data, and information transparency, while still ensuring that patients get lost in the transitions of care.

The great thing about this story (for healthcare’s bankers), is that patients still get stuck with high deductible plans and increasing burden of costs.

The great thing for patients is that by 2025 healthcare will look, act, and be delivered drastically different than it is today. Many of the incumbants of today will be gone tomorrow.

They will not see the disruptors coming.

The new entrants, focusing on really difficult problems, that will come in with new models, new thinking, and simplifying the care process. Returning the words of a healthcare story that we all prefer, the one focused on the patient — physician relationship.

The story that delivers care at the N of 1.

As always you can feel free to email me at cancergeek@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter @cancergeek You can read past issues of my weekly newsletter by clicking this link: newsletter

~Cancergeek