A few years ago, I resolved to use my talents, experiences, and scars to work with others to radically improve healthcare.
Since I established my personal mission, my career choices got easier. As a general internist, I’ve pursued an eclectic path:
- Practicing traditional internal medicine in every delivery setting
- Leading an independent medical group (Cornerstone Healthcare)
- Founding a population health company (CHESS Health Solutions)
- Heading a startup in whole genome sequencing and rare disease (Envision Genomics)
- Leading an integrated primary care and mental health company in the long-term care space (Eventus Wholehealth)
My experiences included weighing in on national health care policy, teaching, and writing. Despite my efforts, the American healthcare industry seems to worsen. There remain too many healthcare workers suffering from burnout, unsustainable costs, questionable quality, and low levels of public trust.
One might question my success, but I am not discouraged. I helped build care models for patients that resulted in extraordinary outcomes. The key to achieving these results at scale requires a fundamental reframing around several important principles:
- Understand the difference between core and chore in healthcare. The core mission of every healthcare organization should be to provide excellent care for the patients they serve. Organizations often confuse the chores they do to fulfill that mission as the mission itself. For primary care physicians like myself, the increasingly burdensome task of completing clinical documentation seems to be the job. Similarly, revenue cycle management, prior authorizations, compliant coding, inbox management, and other chores are often seen as the job, rather than taking care of patients.
- Use human-centered design to improve the quality and efficiency of clinical work. Human-centered design focuses on the needs, behaviors, and experiences of its end users. Too often in healthcare, this approach is not used – point solutions are superimposed on top of already dysfunctional workflows.
- Radical healthcare improvement requires changes in patient care models, industry operating models, and payment models simultaneously. Efforts to improve patient care are only sustainable when supported by aligned payments models and operational changes. Traditional incumbents and startup innovators alike cannot be successful without concomitantly working across the rubric of these interrelated components. Policymakers should also consider the impact of their work across these verticals.
My current role is Chief Medical Officer of IKS Health. Our company offers a platform to remove many of the chores that interfere with healthcare providers. We work directly with our clients to design administrative and clinical workflows that reduce the burdens they face. Human-centered design principles are at the heart of our work and my ongoing experience as a part-time practicing internist allows me to demonstrate the empathy I need to remain focused on solving these chores.
With the advent of generative AI, predictive AI, and machine learning about to be inculcated into our clinical practices, the importance of these three principles will increase exponentially if we are to have the cost-effective, high-quality healthcare outcomes we should deliver.
Connect with Dr. Grace Terrell here.
