No MDs Needed — Why Anyone Can Make a Difference in Health Care
You don’t have to be a doctor to make an impact in health care.
It takes a doctor — especially an experienced one — like Mark Hernandez to make that sort of claim, and he did so excitedly during his recent Vital Signs lecture.
The enthusiasm in that idea comes from the possibilities that get opened up when the goal of health care providers and others in related fields put their focus on improving people’s health and keeping them healthy instead of administering care and services that they can charge a fee for.
Hernandez, who has served for four years as the chief medical officer for the Austin area’s Community Care Collaborative, sees the potential for tech professionals, engineers, financiers and more to utilize their talents for businesses or programs that make it easier to change people’s behaviors and keep them healthy.
That could mean a programmer coming up with a new app to manage a patient’s prescription and exercise regimens, or a team of economics and data professionals coming up better ways to predict population-level health needs far into the future. Basically, the message is you don’t need a diploma, stethoscope and prescription pad to make a difference in how the Austin area will be approaching health care in the very near future.
That is a critical development for Hernandez, the man with the job of stitching together and then strengthening the community health network made possible by the creation of the Dell Medical School.
On top of meeting with lots of lawyers, physicians, health care executives and other business leaders to plan for the future, he’s responsible for making both system-level and individual decisions on how public money dedicated toward care for the poor and uninsured is spent.
A lot of that money goes toward treatment of chronic conditions related to heart disease and diabetes, which demand expensive interventions when not properly managed by patients.
Hernandez remarked during his lecture that there’s basically been no real need for new, expensive drugs that have been developed to treat diabetes in recent decades. That condition could be treated using the same drugs available in the ’80s and that patients who exercise, watch their diet and monitor their blood sugar — ie, inexpensive behavioral factors that don’t require doctor visits or medicine — are far and away the most likely to live successfully.
Taking the diabetes example further, devices or technologies that reinforce and promote positive behaviors and can demonstrate a positive effect in those populations have a great opportunity with the health care shift that Hernandez and others see coming. Moving toward a system where patient health outcomes are what determines payment, vendors and innovators that can reduce the impact of ongoing health conditions are a natural piece of the puzzle.
Thinking much bigger; if the population as a whole needed to consume fewer drugs for chronic illness then that could begin to shift he demand curve and research and development priorities of international health care players like Merck, which has expressed interest in setting up an information technology hub in Austin.
That presence would let the company play a role in creating a new way to deliver health care on a population level. And it’s a new frontier where anyone who has an interest in health and desire to help will have an opportunity to make their mark.
