Book by Kaiser CEO

George Halvorson, the Chairman and CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, has just published a book called “Health Care Reform Now! A Prescription for Change”. A news clipping service I have sent me a summary from Business Insurance. It is published by John Wiley & Sons and is $27.95. It sounds quite interesting. Here are a few things which the article highlighted.

He says that the US does not have a health care system in place but has a “plethora of uncoordinated, unlinked, economically segregated, operationally limited microsystems…a nonsystem of care.”

He talks about the concentration of spending (based on Kaiser Permanente data):

• 1% of the US population uses more than 35% of health care dollars
• 5% uses 60%
• 10% spends 70%

He talks about the fact that five chronic diseases are responsible for upwards of 70% of the health care costs in the US:

• Asthma
• Diabetes
• Congestive heart failure
• Coronary artery disease
• Depression

He talks about the problems that arise when there is no communication between health care silos of care which leads to drug interactions and costly hospitalizations.

I haven’t read it yet, but the article says that he offers solutions for each problem and talks in a conversational and occasionally funny way. He proposes using insurance records to create a type of Electronic Medical Record rather than waiting for the long-term solution of integrated systems. He also proposes using computerized medical records to track quality issues.