Interview with Health Care Buzz Word Expert

Medinnovation: Are you a health care buzz expert?

Buzz Word Expert: Indeed, I am. My remarks will reek of transparency, interoperability, transferability, the scholarship of quality and will be evidence-based and digitally-supportable.

Medinnovation: Well said. Can’t ask for anything more than that. But what exactly is a health care buzz word?

Buzz Word Expert: It is a fashionable word or concept associated with health care not understood by outsiders. It’s an inside game only buzz word experts can play.

Medinnovation: Could you be more specific?

Buzz Word Expert: Specificity is not the name of our game. The word or concept must be nebulous, noble, notable and express a common good for mankind. It must represent a quest for the Holy Grail. It must be unanswerable, unchallengeable, and smack of apple pie, motherhood, and fatherhood – all expressed in high-order language and words.

Medinnovation: Anything else?

Buzz Word Expert: Yes, the buzz words must be polysyllabic, and it helps if they come in bursts of three that can be used in any combination: quality information infrastructure, interoperable transparent organizations, performance improvement methodologies, evidence-documented medicine, comprehensive coordinated delivery, actionable support systems, implementable interventions, systematic re-engineering, measurable output parameters, and documentable quality indicators. These are admirable examples. The concepts have to be big, and the words have to be big too.

Medinnovation: It there any room for verbs?

Buzz Word Expert: Of course, Everything must be integrated, coordinated, digitally organized, universally applied. There is no space here for individualism.

Medinnovation: Why can’t you just use simple concepts and simple words for doctors. You might say, for instance: This is the right thing to do. Here are end points to aim for. Here is how to make patients healthy and well. Here is a check list to follow in your practice?

Buzz Word Expert: That is much too transparent and too easily understood by doctors, who we try to keep as “outsiders” in the quality game.

Medinnovation: Who are the “insiders?’

Buzz Word Expert: The “insiders” are outside experts, middlemen, and managers who must come up with a framework, the profits, the transferable information databases, all of which they can use to intervene to institute improvement in the multiple dimensions of quality to justify their continuing existence.

Medinnovation: Like health plans?

Buzz Word Expert: That’s a good example. Health plans can no longer justify their 10 to 20% administrative load by simply paying bills promptly, easing doctor transactions, partnering with physicians, or paying for people with pre-existing illness. Health plans must do something else to oversee the quality and outcomes processes and metrics to keep patients and their bottom lines well.

The insurers must demonstrate they can cut costs, improve health of members, or enhance quality of care and its various and multidimensional measurements at costs employers, doctors, and consumers will swallow. To care out these noble and irrefutable goals, health plans must manage care by data-mining and preventive and predictive model algorithms in order to splice, slice, dice, parse, and predict what might go wrong and how to make it right.

Medinnovation: But how do health plans justify costs of doing all these things? How do they convince skeptical doctors who have yet to see benefits for themselves or their patients on the ground? How do they overcome doctors’ deeply embedded suspicions that health plans rarely do anything constructive that is tangible in the trenches?

Buzz Word Expert: Health plans combine evidence-based medicine with evidence-based management to implement and intervene to impose quality improvement strategies of the highest order and the greatest magnitude and greatest good for all.

Medinnovation:: In other words, talk big, aim high, and let others walk the talk and absorb the cost.

Buzz Word Expert: Something like that.