Ira Byock, MD is the Founder and Chief Medical Officer at the Providence Institute for Human Caring. He also serves as Active Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Community and Family Medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
On May 10th and 11th, Dr. Byock will serve as a speaker and keynote panelist at Becker's Health IT + Clinical Leadership 2018. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place May 10-11th 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Dr. Byock's session, click here.
Question: Who or what are the disruptors that have your attention? Why?
Dr. Ira Byock: Don Berwick creatively disrupted American healthcare by defining the Triple Aim of improving quality of care (including patient experience and satisfaction), the health of populations, while controlling runaway costs. Triple Aim goals have provided compass points for our collective efforts to transform healthcare. Lucian Leape built on this constructive disruption by adding professional caregiver wellbeing – and the aspiration for “joy at work” – to the framework for healthcare transformation, thereby defining the Quadruple Aim.
Q: What did you notice about your healthcare experience the last time you were at the receiving end as a patient?
IB: Despite my doctor being genuinely caring, the visit felt transactional, rather than personal. The focus was on a check list of tasks for my age - vaccinations, medication reconciliation, my weight and BP, and the most cursory of heart and lung examination. Beyond that, there was no inquiry about my priorities or concerns. I left the office with a realization that I would have to drive the personalization of my own healthcare.
My blood pressure was a bit high during the visit, but my doctor seemed unconcerned. So, I bought a home BP monitor and started keeping a daily log. When the readings continued to run high, I emailed my doctor and by email discussed which medication to start on. Without my taking the initiative, this would have remained unaddressed.
Q: Please share a new consumer-centric capability your organization has built or tapped into within the past 18 months.
IB: Within Providence St. Joseph Health, we are redefining quality of care to require alignment with patients’ personal values, preferences and priorities. Operationally, that means every adult patient has an advance directive on file, identifying someone to speak on his or her behalf in the event of an incapacitating medical condition. When a patient has a serious medical condition, quality includes an expectation of shared decision-making to clarify achievable physiological and functional outcomes and the person’s goals for care prior to potentially burdensome treatments. To make “the right way the easy way” for our clinicians, we have created a new “goals of care” note template within our electronic health record, based on Ariadne Lab’s Serious Illness Conversation Guide.