In Our Assumptions About Healthcare by Joe Flower Everything we do about healthcare is governed by our underlying assumptions - and those assumptions are changing. Every traditional assumption we had is not merely whithering away, it is in the process of being turned on its head. We pay for the treatment of disease and trauma as if they were accidents unconnected to anything we do or know. Our contact with them is episodic, high intensity, low touch.
Doctors are independent and self-sufficient carriers of information and judgment.
Health care is something you pay for and those who can t pay get less of it or none at all. So cost management in health care is event-driven. In the healthcare industry, our job is to treat people with trauma, and people whose diseases that have reached the acute, symptomatic stage, through dosing and cutting, if they have the right paperwork - and our success as a business is measured by the number of warm bodies in our custody on any given evening. Much of ill health will be predictable, capable of being prevented or managed. We will pay for that prediction, prevention, and management because it is easier, cheaper, and more humane.