Guest: Timothy Harrington, MD, Rheumatologist, retired Professor of Medicine, UW School of Medicine and Public Health
In their recently-released book, Great Health Care Value: Chronic Diseases, Practice Teams, and Population Management, Timothy Harrington, MD and his co-author Andrew Johnson, MS, MBA, provide their perspectives on how the American Health Care System is failing to serve the needs of many patients, the healthcare providers who care for them, and the American people. They then share how health care delivery can be improved and value optimized through redesigning practices that serve those with chronic diseases – which account for most of our health care costs.
On this program, Dr. Harrington describes the bottlenecks of care that exist in traditional practices and how better coordinated care for larger numbers of patients can be achieved at a lower cost per patient. At a time when physician burnout is at an all-time high, health care costs continue to rapidly escalate, and even the insured are faced with increasingly long wait times to get an appointment, Dr. Harrington advocates for a fundamental change to effective team care and population management for chronic diseases and describes what that looks like.
Dr. Harrington also breaks down the current health care debate and shares why he prefers adding the “Public Option” to the Affordable Care Act as a first step toward creating high-value, affordable, universal health care.
More information is available at greathealthcarevalue.com.
