Expert Witness Blog
In JRW Healthcare Article, health insurance expert witness Jon R. Wampler writes:
Finally, we need to establish our teaching and training hospitals as places where new physicians are trained in providing appropriate, cost-effective care. Patients could be assured that our very best in research and training universities are committed to the treatment of everyday patients, not just the rare or exceptional cases. This ‘cream of the crop’ mentality would guarantee treatment by the very best and brightest, who could provide, develop and create leading edge treatments to help serve the entire medical community.
We need to redefine the role of public research universities to helping all Americans and all physicians find just what works and what doesn’t in the treatment of common illnesses. Let our research universities be at the forefront of establishing best practices and then let them lead by developing and implementing outcome-based medicine. Every public university that teaches and trains physicians would be called upon to look at local and regional methods of treatment and work closely with the medical community at large to find ways to be much better at prevention, provide effective treatments and realize data driven outcome results. We have the finest research universities in the world. Let’s use them as a tool to train our new physicians in being the best, most cost effective, efficient physicians that they can be.
These simple steps have the potential to save over $500 Billion annually of our current healthcare expenditures; a very good start to funding additional care for the uninsured.
This plan requires something from everyone; not just health professionals, not just trial lawyers, not just patients, not just government – – – but everyone. We can not delude ourselves into thinking that by simply cutting costs on the supply side without looking at the demand side we can ever be successful at healthcare reform.Americans are generally satisfied with the healthcare they receive. We should focus our time and attention on improving those parts of the system that need repair. We should not be changing what works well for most Americans. Let us strive to fix what we have by taking more accountability for our own health, creating a new physician population, reforming our tort system, reinventing how insurance can be more portable/flexible and using public Universities to educate physicians using new decision making practices and exploring the possibilities of innovative treatments.