Julie M. Donnelly
Reporter- Boston Business Journal
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts CEO Andrew Dreyfus, in remarks delivered at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast, outlined a four-point prescription for transforming the Massachusetts health care system to one with better quality and lower costs.
“If health care reform is a marathon, we are already at mile 22 – Cleveland Circle – on (health care) coverage, and mile 15 on quality – crossing Wellesley at Route 16…but when it comes to cost, we’re barely to Framingham, with a long challenging race ahead of us.”
First, the health care system must speed up the transition to new health care payment models that pay for value, not volume of procedures. Secondly, it must promote wellness versus treating illness, and third, it must empower patients to take an active role in their health. These three, he acknowledged, aren’t new ideas.
But he said in order to make progress on those three, the Massachusetts health care community will have to set aside to historic divides that block progress.
Dreyfus said its time to retire the age-old debate about whether government intervention or market forces are better for bringing about change.
“In fact, we need government – which already funds half the care in Massachusetts – to provide proper safeguards, and we need competitive forces to prompt innovation and improvement,” Dreyfus said. “The new (health cost containment) law offers a careful balance of the two, and our job is to make sure that both government and the market deliver.”
He said it’s also time to move beyond the historic tension between the practice of medicine and the business of medicine, to enable clinicians to, for instance, use claims data from insurers to inform best practices to improve quality and reduce costs.
Finally, Dreyfus said the last conflict to reconcile is between the view of health care as an individual good, versus a communal good – only by seeing as both does the health care system effectively address important infrastructure challenges such as connecting electronic medical records among far-flung hospitals.
Health Care/Life Sciences
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