Becker's Speaker Series: 4 questions with Augusta Health CMO and VP for Population Health Management Dr. Richard Embrey

Richard Embrey, MD, joined Fishersville, Va.-based Augusta Health as CMO and vice president for population health management this year.

Board-certified in general surgery and thoracic surgery, Dr. Embrey previously served as CMO of Salem, Va.-based LewisGale Regional Health System and CMO of Birmingham, Ala.-based Princeton Baptist Medical Center. A native of Lynchburg, Va., Dr. Embrey has also worked as an associate professor of surgery at Duke University in Durham, N.C.Embrey Richard Headshot

On Wednesday, April 19, 2017, Dr. Embrey will speak at the Becker's Hospital Review 8th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place from April 17 through April 20 in Chicago.

To learn more about the conference and Dr. Embrey's session, click here.

Question: If you could eliminate one of the healthcare industry's issues overnight, which would it be?

RE: The complexity of healthcare. Healthcare has become so complex that it is difficult to identify areas to improve. In fact, I would say we're trying so hard to reduce costs that we may actually be adding costs to healthcare. We're chasing our tails — as we try to solve our problems, we're creating more problems.

Q: What do you see as the biggest population health challenge facing the Fishersville, Va., area?

RE: Identifying patients with chronic diseases. A lot of people aren't very compliant and don't like to use the healthcare system, so it's hard to find the patients who need our help. They wait until it's too late and then come in with problems that are much more severe than they would be if we'd found them earlier.

Q: What keeps you up at night?

RE: Is healthcare sustainable? Are the costs of healthcare going to escalate so fast that people are going to lose value?

Q: The session you're leading in April is called "Kenneth Arrow Fifty Years Later: What Has Changed and What Has Remained the Same?" Could you give a brief preview of the session?

RE: In 1963, a famous economist named Kenneth Arrow, PhD, wrote a paper called "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care." He was commissioned by the Ford Foundation to do this before the launch of Medicare. At the time, there were a lot of concerns about socialized medicine and whether insurance would lead to more utilization of healthcare.

In the paper, Dr. Arrow wrote about uncertainty and made a point that everybody has forgotten in the past 50 years regarding uncertainty and not knowing whether someone's going to get sick. The incidence of disease and efficacy of treatment cause all kinds of abnormalities in the market of healthcare, and those problems also cause an increase in cost.

It was the first paper on which the field of healthcare was founded, but Dr. Arrow didn't stay in healthcare. "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care" was the most important paper in healthcare that nobody in the industry has ever read. I plan to go back and review it for people. I hope a refresher will help people focus on what we're trying to do in healthcare today.

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