[Ask doctors about the time they spend with patients, and most go immediately on the defensive.] For some people, a periodic health exam is a metaphoric concept rather than a real one, ... Not all counseling and preventive services have to be done within that clinical visit; a doctor can get the ball rolling with additional visits for follow-up. |
[The emphasis today is on relatively low-tech screens for signs of incipient chronic disease -- adult-onset diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, cancer and the like. To help doctors track these indicators, the preventive services task force revises its guidelines continuously. Recently, for example, the task force recommended that doctors screen patients for depression. The screen is simple, almost a casual conversation --] How's work? Are you feeling stressed? Are you sleeping? ... Many people who are depressed don't go to a psychiatrist looking for insight. Most are seen in primary-care situations. |
From an existing customer perspective, we're trying to retain them, and for the folks who are not customers, we'd love them to become customers. |
The fact that we know it exists prompts a lot of local communities to say, 'What's going on here?' and to figure out also why it matters. |
The findings here reinforce how difficult it is coordinating care. . . . That's the next frontier. |
The findings show that we have a lot to learn from our colleagues |
The public and private sectors are increasingly pursuing complementary strategies to advance system performance. Janet is the exact right person to help accelerate and focus this positive and critically important direction. |
The virtue of seeing a doctor who knows you is, if you come in and say, 'I have a headache,' he or she knows whether you always have headaches or if this is an earth-shattering event because you haven't had a headache in 40 years. |
We're trying to fit a new healthcare paradigm into an old payment system. It won't be pretty and it won't be easy, but we can do it if we do it together. |
We're trying to give people the information they need to decide their approach; we're not telling them what to do, we're not being prescriptive. |
We're very excited that we'll be learning from these plans as they go, and we'll learn what works under various circumstances, |
We've got terrific measurements information in some areas, but in other areas we don't have good measurements at all. |