StopHealthBarriers podcast

Today, many people express intense displeasure with the quality and cost for healthcare services. In several of my previous podcasts, I’ve rung this alarm, yet few innovators, elected officials and workers who enjoy lucrative employment within the medical, industrial, insurance complex have taken the message seriously. Every year, population health companies churn out new apps linking smart-phones and watches to imply that exercise alone will improve your health. There is no doubt that exercise is a critical part of good health. But… the truth is, joggers, runners, skiers, and even mountain climbers get sick. Sometimes with common inherited chronic illnesses like diabetes, kidney, heart and lung disease. Even gold medalists get cancer. This is where the Know Your Colors app excels. The ability to intuitively see the health status of multiple organs is powerful information that confirms a diagnosis and suggests a treatment plan. Also, the Know Your colors app illuminates’ changes in health over treatment time. It’s like a check engine light telling you how you’re responding to treatment. Or telling you, perhaps a second opinion is in order.  

This podcast is inspired by recent press articles dealing with tenured medical school professors who are now, and have been receiving lucrative kick-backs of cash and gifts from drug companies to conduct research that encourages the use of the drug company’s newest drug.

As Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg stated in their book – Redefining Healthcare: a value-based outcome is the health benefit received for each dollar spent. Yet how do we measure this health benefit correlated to each dollar spent? How can we determine the value of delivered health services, when we don’t even have a measure for the starting level of an illness? “Know Your Colors” by calculation of the illness complexity score provides that value-added benefit. The illness complexity score is not a health score, as touted by competitor products, rather it’s a measure of the health burden resulting from your primary illness, and dysfunction of other secondary organs. It’s a score, that predicts the monthly dollar cost for care, and a dynamic measure of treatment results.

This episode will highlight the advantages of our innovative software tool Know Your Colors and compare it to existing patient engagement tools. Know Your Colors is based on the premise that patient engagement must be tailored to a person’s personal objective medical test results. Not general questionnaires – but personal medical test results over time. Like blood test results, physical exam results, x-ray results, or clinical stages of illness. All objective meaningful data that can score a value-based outcome.

Better patient engagement, improved cost transparency, and reliable quality scoring of healthcare providers are crucial concerns for patients, providers, and insurers in this period of rising healthcare costs. The “Know Your Colors” web application provides an answer to these challenges through an innovative web platform that replaces scoring of quality care based on bills and claim data to an objective data system based on routine personal medical test results.

One of the greatest challenges facing the United States is the opioid crisis. This crisis causes despair, suicide, and shreds the moral fabric of America. Yet at its simplest level, it’s a problem of supply, demand, and a solution that evades us. Many experts place the supply problem on the medical profession, the demand problem on Big Pharm for faulty research and greed, which masquerades the latest new opioid drug as safe. And the insurance complex which reimburses drugs that obtunds addicts but reduces lengthy hospital care that patients need.

The rehabilitation of a drug or alcohol addict is not a one-month affair. It’s usually a life-time quest, which requires a strong daily commitment by the addict, and the support of trained professionals, family, friends, and co-workers.

Consider all the barriers that obstruct transparency for a value-based outcome in traditional medicine. However, the greatest barricades impeding access to healthcare value reside in the domain of mental health services. Mental health care is handicapped by an incomplete understanding of brain function, the inability to predict cost of care, and the randomness of when a psychiatric emergency will trigger gun violence or suicide. This podcast will explore the evolution of mental health services and argue its inclusion as part of transparent traditional medical care.

Health barriers are a mix of concrete turf wars to preserve income, market share and price control, mixed with loam binders like poor transparency among physicians, payers and patients. The result is lower quality at higher price. Medical care is a personal touch affair. Though experts may craft a treatment plan, its delivery or follow up after an invasive surgical event requires skill, compassion, and handholding delivered by nurses. Nurses live with hospital patients and form super-glue bonds that may fade on discharge. But leave a tattoo on the soul.

Health Barriers can emerge early in medical school when the balance between “work and life-balance” shifts away from patient care and healthcare value. This podcast will highlight the erratic pendulum swings from the Flexner Report of 1910 to the long working hours demanded by Dr. William Osler’s hospital residency programs, to the tragic collision between the Libby Zion death in 1984, resulting in a Grand Jury investigation of two medical residents for murder, and ended with a shift of billions of dollars away from hospital training programs to the creation of Hospitalists.

When health barriers conceal how medical services are priced and quality graded, it fosters fractured care.  Some of these barriers are systemic to the healthcare system itself.  The information gap between consumer and insurance payer creates misaligned goals among patients, doctors and payers.  This podcast illustrates how these barriers limit universal access and stifle value-based outcomes.  Our goal is to transform you into an educated consumer and advocate for healthcare reform.  

Stop Health Barriers is a station focused on highlighting the barriers, that conceal how healthcare services are graded for quality, price, and delivered outcome. These barriers can limit your wellness goals and reduce the value of the healthcare services you think you will receive. Although healthcare access is a right, it’s far from universal without insurance. And even with insurance, there are hidden barriers awaiting you. Invisible barriers discovered only when sick. This weekly radio series will identify and expose those barriers, making you an educated consumer of healthcare services, as well as, a knowledgeable advocate for healthcare reform. Since we believe that an educated consumer is our healthiest listener.