Interview With Dr. Olivier Raynaud At #WHCC11

I had an opportunity to sit down with Dr. Olivier Raynaud from the World Economic Forum while I was at the 8^th Annual World Healthcare Congress in DC. If you don’t know them, they put on DAVOS.

It was a great discussion as Dr. Raynaud brings a wonderful macro-economic view of the healthcare problem with lots of global experience. Let’s start by talking about three areas of focus:

1. Better health from better data
2. Creating the right health ecosystem connecting different players
3. Building leadership

These all sound so simple – right?

The first one – data. This is critical and something that the World Economic Forum worked on to create a data charter for healthcare. Getting multiple constituents to agree even conceptually would be a battle (in my assessment).

The second one – ecosystem. His prospective was so much broader that the typical – patient, provider, pharmacist, payer. For example, he talked about the city mayor as critical. He talked about how addressing smoking, exercise, and food choices was systemic and had a profound impact on our work, our lives, and ultimately our taxes. He talked about employers and how 54% of the world’s population is an employee.

We talked about how employers or cities are more likely to take a long-term view of health than an entity that has to show Fiscal Year results. We talked about the impact on productivity, reputation, and loyalty that health can have for a company and how those things impact costs like recruiting costs.

The third topic – leadership. Here we talked about the need to think differently and create global efforts. We spent a lot of time talking about starting Electronic Health Records during pregnancy since there are certain behaviors (smoking, drugs, eating) that can impact the child and ultimately their health. This framework is just starting to be discussed by people and is becoming easier with the proliferation of technology and low-cost of data.

We talked about the fact that 60% of costs are preventable. He suggested that the history of how AIDS has been addressed offers some great lessons learned around Access, Awareness, and Education. Just getting people to get tested has had a big impact.

[Meanwhile, someone else at the conference talked about the general failure of health programs across the world and the percentage of spend that doesn’t contribute to improved outcomes…a complicating factor.] The World Economic Forum has an opportunity to identify and spread best practices by getting all the constituents together and aligned.

We then finished up talking about engagement and trust. He had a great perspective about different search algorithms. For example, if you search for vaccines in the US, the CDC has most of the top placements. But, that’s not true outside the US. You might see lots more about fear of vaccines. There is a need ultimately for some type of “trust certification”. But, that has to meet the academic’s and clinician’s needs but be useable by the general public and take into account peer-to-peer and other data that is now appearing.

It was an interesting discussion that just helped open my eyes to a broader perspective. I wish them a lot of luck in pulling these groups together to expand the ecosystem and create leaders that know how to use data to make a difference.