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| The Siren Song of Continuous Improvement: Musings in the life of an internist, cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist |
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by Westby G. Fisher, MD, FACC - October 31, 2011
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Provided by Dr. Wes
This is what medicine has become in the eyes of our regulators:
Federal health officials are seeking physicians and other health professionals for a program to develop leaders in health care innovation.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Oct. 17 announced the Innovation Advisors Program, which will accept up to 200 people in its first year. Advisers will develop projects and processes in their home regions that achieve the goals of bettering population health, improving health care delivery and lowering costs through continuous improvement. They will focus on Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Continuous. Never-ending. Infinite.
As if money had no limits.
More. More. More.
More doctors-turned-administrators. More “projects” and more “processes” like Pay for Performance and Quality Measures. More keyboard entry time.
But note that this is continuous improvement but is limited to government programs: a fact that contradicts the word "continuous."
The implications to policy makers who use such trendy buzz phrases like “continuous improvement” is that doctors and current public policy workers aren’t already working to constantly improve our patients’ health. Instead, we are messy, doing expensive things that involve too much time and too much money.
So new programs must be developed and their processes measured to see if they work.
Isn’t this the point of "continuous improvement?"
So the government's answer for continuous improvement is to acquire 200 more Anointed Ones woven from the same cloth to help us all "improve." (Well, at least for the first year. No doubt more will be needed in the future. “Continuous,” remember?)
But there's another, better way.
It's a way that will save (literally) billions upon billions of dollars ffor our health care system and taxpayers of this great country. Best of all, it's simple, effective, and guaranteed to work:
Stop continuously improving projects and processes that don’t exist.
-Wes
Westby G. Fisher, MD, FACC is a board certified internist, cardiologist, and cardiac electrophysiologist (doctor specializing in heart rhythm disorders) practicing at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, IL, USA and is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine. He entered the blog-o-sphere in November, 2005. DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in this blog are strictly the those of the author(s) and should not be construed as the opinion(s) or policy(ies) of NorthShore University HealthSystem.
The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.
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