HIMSS Changemaker Lifetime Achievement Award

George Halvorson HIMSS Changemaker Lifetime Achievement Award Acceptance Speech, Part 2

Aug 23, 2021

Former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson has written on THCB on and off over the years, most notably last year with his proposal for Medicare Advantage for All post-COVID. This month he was given a lifetime achievement award by HIMSS and we are running his acceptance speech in two parts. We ran part one last week, and here’s part two– Matthew Holt

We also initially have an important and continuously improving sense of the epigenetic processes that exist in all of us to develop our own responses to the world we are in at a biological level, and we should be able to use that information to improve our health and our care.

That is extremely relevant to you because it is very much a systems and coding issue to bring epigenetics into care delivery and care systems.

The magnificent, wonderful, and extremely powerful new CRISPR tool kit actually used computer like coding approaches and created a vaccine for Covid that explicitly triggered our body’s immune responses exactly as our epigenetics are naturally programmed and coded to do for other vaccine approaches.

We will be able to use that set of tools to improve our responses to cancer and multiple other diseases in a growing variety of important ways. We actually now can choose to evolve as a species because that particular tool actually allows us to change our genetic code in very channeled and intentional ways. That capability and reality is hugely important — and we will now be able to use those new tools in a growing range of ways.

We should be able to stabilize or reduce the amount of money we spend on care when we put these full sets of tools in place.

However — we also do need to become better and smarter buyers of care to make that full set of enhancements happen.

Every economic system on the planet does what it is paid to do. Care is not an exception to that reality.

That full connectivity level and organized team care for patients will only happen if we decide as a nation to stop buying all care by the piece — and if we move to paying for total care for our patients to teams of appropriately supported caregivers who are rewarded financially for continuous improvement.

Care sites everywhere in the world do what they are paid to do. They also do not do things they are not paid to do. They function as businesses everywhere, so they do what every business does in every industry and they give their customer exactly what the customer pays for.

No business in any industry uses any other model.

With that reality in mind — we all need to understand the fact that we Americans buy care very badly.

George Halvorson HIMSS Changemaker Lifetime Achievement Award Acceptance Speech, Part 1

Aug 18, 2021

Thank you for giving me this first ever HIMSS Changemaker In Health Care Lifetime Achievement Award.

You are honoring an extremely impressive set of other current changemakers at this particular national meeting for 2021 and I am very honored and pleased to be the first person to be given the Lifetime Achievement version of this Changemaker award.

Changemaking is a good thing.

Changemaking is actually happening at a massive level for health care systems right now and that is good for health care and it is good for health care patients.

We are actually at the dawn of a golden age for health care systems, and I deeply appreciate being recognized for having done several fun, useful, and interesting things over time to help get us to where we are now.

As you pointed out, I have personally had a chance to work very directly on rolling out full electronic medical record systems in a couple of real and functional care systems to tens of millions of people.

It worked well.

We ended up with care sites in those settings that literally had no internal paper flows and that had and still have instantly available medical information for thousands of caregivers about their patients.

That tool kit worked extremely well.

Those care sites ended up with the highest ratings in the country for both quality of care and service and that high level of performance happened because the sites had both a culture of continuous improvement in their care settings and the highest levels of continuously available data for the caregivers in those sites about the patients they served.

“All-All-All.”

That was a mantra, a goal, and a strategy — and it became an actual functional capability.

Having All of the information about All the patients All the time — All-All-All is a good mantra, an extremely practical goal, an extremely functional strategy, and a very solid working practice for the delivery of care — and that data strategy worked even better than we had hoped it would work when we started down that path.

Having full electronic data on every patient improved diabetic care, chronic heart disease care, and stroke and heart damage prevention — and it created major reductions in the complications of care for chronic care patients in every category of care in all of those settings.

The data about patients was expanded at Kaiser Permanente to be the first major site and system in the world to add race and ethnicity to the care data for millions of patients.