Fourth Annual World Health Care Congress
When: April 22-24 2007
Where: Washington (D.C.) Convention Center
What: The Fourth Annual World Health Care Congress, co-sponsored by
The Wall
Street Journal, is a meeting of chief and senior executives from all sectors of
health care. The 2007 conference includes more than 1,800 CEOs, senior executives
and government officials from the nation’s largest employers, hospitals, health
systems, health plans, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and leading government
agencies.
Conference info:
www.worldcongress.com and
www.worldhealthcareblog.org
Day 2—Monday, April 23, 2007
If I could have been everywhere at once, I would have checked out the following
seminars, which you may be able to get online at
www.whcc2007.com. David Gergen,
editor-at-large of U.S. News and World Reports, and Peter Lee of the Pacific Business
Group on Health spoke about efforts to make health care more transparent and various
national efforts aimed at getting doctors and hospitals to report data about the
quality and cost of care. The hope is to establish standards of medical care that
can be used to determine how much employers pay doctors for health care—rather than
having them pay a fixed amount for every health care service delivered. This is
the effort to move from a "fee for service" system to a "pay for performance" model
in health care.
Instead, I went to see Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, and Michael Critelli, chairman
and CEO of Pitney Bowes, speak about their "call to action" for employers to become
more involved in leading change in health care. Barrett and Critelli are particularly
interested in providing digital "personal health records" that would give individuals
portable, private and personal health records. These would contain all of their
medical information, which they could then share with their doctors. In December,
Intel and Pitney Bowes—along with Wal-Mart, BP and Applied Materials—announced the
formation of Dossia, a group aimed at giving employees a way to manage their health
care in a manner that would promote greater efficiency, lower costs and improved
health. Barrett showed a flashy short film on the group and said the employees of
the group would have a health record by the end of the year. But it is unclear whether
employees will be able to access the record if they leave their companies.
Barrett, like other business leaders, bemoans the health care system’s inattention
to the consumer. "Only in health care do you see concern with the internal operations
of a company and not the consumer," he said.
Barrett said he could find an ATM when he visited Easter Island, 2,000 miles
off the coast of Chile, but he can’t get his health records easily transferred from
a hospital in California to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
Barrett also said that "every major corporation I know is looking at wellness
programs," including Intel.
Later in the morning, Steven Burd, CEO of Safeway and private-sector evangelist
for health care reform, responded to that issue indirectly (since he was on the
other side of the convention center from Barrett). "We have 300 million people in
the country, and if we don’t solve the problem it’s going to be bad for companies
and the American people."
Burd, who has implemented a high-deductible health plan integrated with a wellness
program for Safeway employees, has a five-point proposal for federal health care
reform:
1. Market-base-driven health care. This means giving employees a financial stake
in their health by turning them into consumers.
2. Universal coverage and individual responsibility. This means everyone gets health
insurance because everyone MUST get health insurance, just as all automobile owners
must buy collision coverage.
3. Financial assistance for low-income Americans.
4. Encouragement for people to foster healthy behaviors.
5. Equal tax treatment for individuals and employers, essentially ending the preferential
tax treatment employers receive to provide health care.
Burd would like the "opportunity to redesign health plans for government employees
and in particular for members of Congress." He would base the plan on Safeway’s,
which uses elements of consumerism, with high-deductible plans, and wellness programs
that encourage employees to lead healthier lives.
Unfortunately, few doctors and hospital administrators heard what Burd and other
CEOs had to say about how they want to reform the health care system. That's because
most doctors were attending seminars on how to fix the health care system from their
end, as medical providers. Likewise, employers, focused on their own problems with
health care costs, attend separate seminars that address their specific needs. In
this way, the conference reflects the bifurcation of the health care system itself.
--Jeremy Smerd
Day 1—Sunday, April 22, 2007
Tucked inside the nation’s $2 trillion annual health care bill is a line item
for conferences, of which the World Health Care Congress is among the most wide-ranging.
Conference attendees represent the health care spectrum, from those who pay for
medical care (employers, governments and health insurers) to those who get paid
for health care (doctors and hospitals)—and all those in between (pharmacy benefit
managers, disease management companies, medical product manufacturers, pharmaceutical
companies and all sorts of innovators in health care).
Last year’s keynotes included President Bush, on tape, via satellite from an
undisclosed location. Other notable keynotes from last year included former UnitedHealth
Group chairman and CEO William McGuire, who spoke on a day last April when The Wall
Street Journal (one of the conferences sponsors, no less) came out with a front-page
story on the millions of dollars McGuire earned by backdating stock options. McGuire
was quickly ushered out of the conference hall before reporters could ask questions.
This year, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott will give the closing keynote at a time when
his company is under scrutiny for allegedly recording conversations between employees
and reporters, as well as private shareholder meetings. Other big-name speakers
from the employer community include: Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel; Linda Dillman,
executive vice president of risk management, benefits and sustainability at Wal-Mart;
Michael Critelli, chairman and CEO of Pitney Bowes; and Adam Bosworth, vice president,
Google.
On Sunday, one of the presentations was on the Care Focused Purchasing Initiative.
Like some other sessions here, this one has been touring the conference circuit
since at least last year. Care Focused Purchasing is an employer-sponsored effort
to pool health insurance claims data from some of the country’s largest employers,
such as Boeing and Lowe’s. Claims data shows how doctors bill health insurers and
thus sheds a light on the kind of medicine that doctors practice.
As employers hire companies to help manage the medical care that is provided
to employees, claims information—a.k.a. data—has emerged as a new buzzword. The
purpose of using data is that it helps employers analyze and understand which doctors
are among the most cost-efficient and medically effective. Critics, however, say
the data is limited because it does not communicate what ultimately is most important:
Did the doctor make the patient healthy? This debate and many other questions that
are at the forefront of today’s health care debate will play out over the course
of the next 48 hours, until Lee Scott closes the conference with a keynote address
Tuesday at 4 p.m.
Speaker presentations and information can be viewed at
www.whcc2007.com/community.
--Jeremy Smerd
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