What trends are shaping the future of health care, and how are health care leaders guiding greater health? We’re looking forward to learning from and alongside some of the top minds in health care at AHIP 2022, June 21-23 in Las Vegas.
We’ve curated a collection of fresh insights from just a few of our key speakers to prepare you ahead of the in-person event.
1. Improving health means improving our climate.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, says that health care leaders can champion well-being for all Americans — only if they also work to improve social determinants of health caused by environmental changes. Recently, Dr. Benjamin discussed the value of teaching health equity and climate change in medical schools.
“You can get physicians to be a little more holistic in their approach, and recognize these social determinants make a difference,” he told The Grist. “Physicians are influential in their community. And so making sure they understand that [to] connect the dots for human health is important.”
2. Partnership got us out of the worst of the pandemic and is the key to solving deep inequities that the crisis exposed.
Bechara Choucair, M.D., is the senior vice president and chief health officer at Kaiser Permanente and served as the as vaccine coordinator on the White House COVID-19 Response Team. His takeaway from the past two years of crisis?
“We learned that we can partner across industries and sectors to protect essential workers, family, and friends, and those communities that are too often the first to feel the effect of a crisis and the last to receive relief,” he shared recently on LinkedIn. “The pandemic revealed stark inequities in nearly every part of our society, and we are emerging with a better understanding of the steps we need to take to advance health equity.”
3. Sometimes access to health care means catching a ride.
As the Global Head of Uber Health, Caitlin Donovan is focused on solutions to health care access — including partnering with health insurance providers like CVS Health to address social barriers to care involving transportation. The joint program provides free rides to providers in select underserved communities.
"We've long known that access to reliable transportation can help address critical gaps in care that often disproportionately affect vulnerable communities,” she said. “It's more important than ever for communities to have the tools they need to bridge care gaps and achieve better patient and population health outcomes.”
4. Virtual care is how we’ll bring individual care to the masses.
For David L. Holmberg, president and chief executive officer of Highmark Health, what’s new in health care delivery is here to stay.
“We're going to see a real acceleration of innovation in how care is delivered. When everything was shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a real adoption, a real pivot to telemedicine as a tool to be able to create access,” he said on an AHIP podcast episode. “What we're seeing is it's very, very effective in behavioral health, and very effective with primary care, and it can be effective with maintenance care with specialists if done properly. We think it's a critical part of the future.”
5. Data, smartly applied, is the best cure for social determinants of health.
Eric Hunter, president and chief executive officer of CareOregon, recently spoke about the future opportunities for coordinated care organizations.
“As we go about the work, let’s make sure that we're looking at social determinants of health not just as a checkbox item, but as a true way to identify and measure outcomes for individuals and communities as a whole,” Hunter said. He added that coordinated care organizations can support primary care providers by helping connect them to community organizations and aggregating this data to provide insights.
“It's not our job to get between a member and their provider, but we need to allow both parties to have all of the information they need to make sound decisions and understand what's working and what isn’t.”
6. Community health is everyone’s business.
Joneigh S. Khaldun, M.D., is a practicing emergency medicine physician and CVS Health’s vice president and chief health equity officer. Dr. Khaldun also led Michigan’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, which required collaboration across all sectors.
“The work of public health is not just about the work of the governmental health department,” she said in a recent interview. “I think that's one thing we've also really had to understand even with this pandemic, it can't be just the government that's doing all the work. We really have to focus on businesses, employers, hospitals, schools.”
Want more insights? Join us this summer to hear from a full slate of the top minds in health care, including Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and professor of health policy and management at George Washington University.