The Doctor Crisis by Jack Cochran

Author:Jack Cochran [Cochran, Jack; Kenney, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610394444
Publisher: PublicAffairs

PART III

Pathway Forward

Solving the Doctor Crisis, Expanding the Learning Coalition

8

Solving the Physician Crisis While Expanding the Learning Coalition

The Quadruple Aim

We have an idea of what the future looks like.

During the past decade, three overriding aspirations have helped define the foundational goals in American health care. The first emerged from Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, the landmark Institute of Medicine report that challenged health care stakeholders to deliver care that is “safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable.”

The second aspiration, framed by Drs. Don Berwick and John Whittington, along with their Institute of Healthcare Improvement colleague Tom Nolan, defined “true north” in health care as the “Triple Aim”—improving the patient experience of care (including quality and satisfaction) while simultaneously improving the health of populations and reducing the per capita cost of care. The third aspiration is the historic challenge to provide robust health insurance to all Americans.

Taken together, these metagoals define a consensus aspiration: high-quality, accessible, affordable care for all. Getting there will require two interrelated, foundational prerequisites: solving the physician crisis to ensure strong, responsible physician leaders and inclusion of all health care stakeholders to expand the Learning Coalition.

As we noted earlier, the Learning Coalition is a collection of individuals and organizations that exist within the fabric of health care—a growing, organic force where physicians and other caregivers come together to identify and solve common problems. At its core is an effort to spread the best learning—to turn the best work anywhere into the standard everywhere.

The Learning Coalition and the physician crisis are deeply interrelated whereby the coalition consists of active physicians practicing in an environment where systems and teams encourage and allow doctors to put the patients’ needs above all else. When this happens, physician satisfaction rates soar. Expanding and enhancing the Learning Coalition will solve a major part of the physician crisis. Therefore, it is essential that health care become a world-class learning industry.

It is our experience—and the experience of many physicians with whom we have worked and spoken—that doctors actively engaged in the Learning Coalition have higher levels of professional satisfaction and efficacy because they are involved with change and improvement and accept the expanded role of the physician as healer-leader-partner to find better solutions for their patients, thereby reducing doctors’ sense of frustration in the face of bureaucratic obstacles.

Patients need doctors to come off the sidelines on a wide variety of issues ranging from primary care to liability reform, from payment methods to access, and from the uses of technology to the challenge of disparities. Physicians are often effective at aggregating around self-interest via national or local organizations that lobby on behalf of the interests of all doctors or particular specialty groups, but patients need physicians to aggregate around their interests. Greater participation in the Learning Coalition throughout the country is an essential component of solving both the physician crisis and the overall health care challenge in the United States.

What does it look like when doctors adopt the role

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.