Yale HealthCare 2010 and YourNurseisOn.com : Healthcare Re-Formed

On the early spring morning of April 9, 2010, thousands of hours of preparations, years of healthcare experience and ideas for the future of healthcare trickled into the Omni Hotel, located in New Haven, CT, for Yale Healthcare 2010. Presented by Yale’s School of Management and titled “Re-Forming Healthcare: Excelling in a Transforming System,” it was chaired by students from The School of Management (Randi Wiggins), The School of Public Health (Diwen Chen) and The School of Medicine (Sachin Shah). It must be said that these co-chairs of the event, and their legion of student volunteers, organized an amazing event that was very well produced, kudos to the team.

Nearly 500 attendees from numerous industries arrived from their many home bases to begin the day with a healthy breakfast and some equally healthy networking. As a part of YourNurseIsOn.com, I was excited to be there as an alumnus, an attendee and a panelist contributor and met many wonderful people in the process. A warm welcome was extended by the Yale School Of Management Dean, Sharon Oster, to get things started.  The morning keynote was delivered by the knowledgeable and witty Gail Wilensky, a senior fellow at Project Hope. Her clever insight into the recently passed ‘Health Reform Bill’ was well received by the audience, and was a great start to the day.

This lead to a quick morning break that was followed by morning breakout sessions

which can be found HERE. 

The session titled “#8: Financing Innovation in Healthcare” was led by Christine Gallagher of SunTrust Robinson Humphrey and Chip Skowron of Morgan Stanley. It was a well attended session that set out to determine the next “billion dollar products” in the healthcare arena, with a focus on pharmaceutical ‘innovations’, new medical devices and novel treatments. Cheap genome scanning seemed to be one of the few consensuses arrived at, with ‘nano-technologies’ in a generic sense, a close second.

Medical device advances will also be interesting to watch in the near future with joint replacements and cardiac technologies shining brightly. I wouldn’t expect to much investment from these larger firms in the popular wellness software and social media space within healthcare at this time- they seem stuck in the Big Pharma model of investing for now. Also, a disturbing sub-trend of big investors ‘chasing growth’ in developing countries with ‘huge markets’ by firms that benefit directly from US taxpayers bailouts was touched upon repeatedly. That trend could prove harmful to American healthcare innovation.

After the morning breakout sessions were finished, many lively lunchtime discussions could be heard in the Grand Ballroom. New acquaintances were made and information from the morning discussions was shared by all. After lunch was finished we transitioned into the Executive Panel discussion with Robert Galvin (General Electric), Michael Chernow (Harvard Med School), Sam Ho (UnitedHealthCare), Harlan Krumholz (Yale Med School) and Wendy Warring (CT Children’s Med Center). Having met Bob, Michael and Sam, I was looking forward to their insights and contributions. As expected, they were wonderful participants, but Harlan and Wendy were shining stars. Harlan’s encyclopedic knowledge and Wendy’s charming and fresh perspective (JD not MD) were excellent additions to the discussion. I look forward to meeting them both.

The afternoon breakout sessions can be found HERE (scroll down).

As CEO of YourNurseIsOn.com, I was invited to participate in breakout discussion #10 titled “Front-line Providers: Increasing Supply, Incentives and Utility.” Joining me on the panel was Mary Warner from the Physician’s Associate program at Yale’s School of Medicine and Bernadette Thomas who started Community Health Center’s Nurse Practitioner Residency Program. Moderated by the wonderful Taffany Hwang, our discussion led off with Mary discussing the background of education and practice for nurse practitioners and physician’s associates as well as their current utilization and future needs. Bernadette followed with CHC’s excellent nurse practitioner residency program to transition new providers into competent practicing professionals that stay in practice. My contributions were focused on the utilization, recruitment and retention of healthcare providers. Instant allocation of a distributed workforce, flex scheduling for recruitment and retention, role transitioning and multi-generational workforces were the themes.

Below you'll find my handout for the presentation:

The audience participants had many insightful contributions, an acute awareness of the challenges we are facing and an enthusiasm to address these issues head on. YourNurseIsOn.com, as a company and myself, personally, were honored to participate in this discussion and thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience.

The afternoon keynote was by Robert Galvin of GE and touched on low price point innovations, developing countries, six sigma, industrial healthcare, measurable outcomes, change management, corporate culture, bottom-line, incentives and insurance costs- for a start. The breadth of the topics exposes but a glimpse of the issues and complexities involved in ‘Re-Forming Healthcare’ and merely begins the deluge of questions about ‘Excelling in a Transforming System.’ 

Yale Healthcare 2010 was an excellent event, many were met, much was learned, and the next one remains anticipated. 

Thank you to all who contributed to and made this event a success. 

YourNurseIsOn.com would like to extend a special thanks to Taffany Hwang and Mark Schlangel for all of their assistance.

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