We need to have a conversation about that elephant in the room! Waste. In Health Care.

Did you know that up to 50% of care delivery, development & deployment are actually considered wasteful? (see Fig 1.7)

Let’s have a conversation about that.

Did you ever feel like a broken record when going to the doctor? Repeating a zillion times your problem, your date of birth, your weight & height, your list of medications, and your whole story to a plethora of receptionists, nurses, doctors, lab and X ray tecnicians? Well, same happened to my friend last weekend. Hear this: Waking up at night with horrendous back pain, she drove herself to the ER. There, a couple of physical exams, lab tests and one X-ray of her back were performed. Only to find (good news!) nothing alarming. Back home a few days later, she fell off her chair when she open the bill – over $10’000 !

What happened? Where does all the money go?

WE DO NOT HAVE AN ISSUE OF RESOURCE SHORTAGES. WE HAVE AN ISSUE OF RESOURCES IN THE WRONG PLACE.

‘It takes 5 to tango’ page 44

Well, in a system that is totally fragmented and operating off legacy infrastructures, redundancies & errors are driving cost uncontrollably. We are today unable to follow the 1 dollar across the patient journey. So, Inefficiencies in all parts of the ecosystem not only drive cost, but also mean loss of quality in care and frustrations with all actors, up to the point of burn-out: doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, pharmacists, payers – & foremost, patients.

In order to restore that broken balance between what has been great progress in medicine and the (lack of) affordability to that progress, we need to move the needle on focusing on what matters most to patients. We need to wrap off that bandage of old-ways-of-working with pen & paper and fundamentally adopt a new culture of working together; stop equaling action with quality; start testing only to answer a specific question; and reward care the same way we do it with procedures, products & performance.

For this to happen, we need to pull 3 levers:

• 1) shifting our incentives to outcomes-based rewards (=value-based health care);
• 2) transform our systems to digitally powered data exchange platforms, supply chains and infrastructures;
• 3) acquire a collaborative skillset to effectively create these new solutions together – in a Tango For Five!

The good news is: the tools for this change to happen are all here! We don’t even have to invent them. All we need to do is to apply them. Together!

TOO MUCH TESTING, TOO MUCH TREATING & TOO LITTLE SCRUTINY OF WHAT’S REALLY NEEDED IS THE TRUE ISSUE.

‘It Takes 5 to Tango’ page 47

Nature doesn’t know waste. It’s a human-made problem. So the solution has to be human-made, too!

And, health care is incredibly complex. No wonder, the solutions are incredibly complex, too! No one actor can solve for all the problems alone. And this takes time. But, if there is one thing that the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us –> change in health care is possible! If there is combined willingness for change and aligned vision to where we want to go, we can make that change happen.

Ready to explore that #TangoForFive?

LET’S DANCE!