The Next Five Years in Health Care: Optimism and Opportunity
Dr. Marc Overhage—a longtime leader in health care technology and policy—dissects persistent design flaws in health care and outlines a pragmatic, positive vision for building better quality into care delivery.
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Our Guest
J. Marc Overhage, MD, PhD SVP for Health Informatics, Elevance Health
J. Marc Overhage, MD, PhD is an experienced health care executive with a proven track record in leading digital health transformations across significant health care organizations.
Dr. Overhage has held significant roles such as Staff Vice President for Health Informatics and Data Architectures at Elevance Health, Vice President of Strategic Intelligence and Chief Medical Information Officer at Cerner Corporation and Founding CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange. He also co-founded TriaAxia Health, a startup that combines clinical and genomic data to support biopharma and life science companies.
Dr. Overhage has contributed to national health information technology (HIT) policy through service on federal advisory committees and influential national organizations. His leadership roles in key organizations, including the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Health Level Seven International (HL7) and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), exemplify his commitment to enhancing health IT.
He holds a doctorate in biophysics and completed medical training at Indiana University School of Medicine, followed by an internship, residency and fellowship in General Internal Medicine (medical informatics).
Episode Description
In this episode of Quality Talks With Peggy O’Kane, NCQA President Peggy O’Kane speaks with primary care and health IT veteran Dr. Marc Overhage.
Marc notes that many of health care’s challenges are design problems—and design problems can be solved. The conversation highlights trailblazing models like hospital-at-home and the need for better data availability at the point of care. Marc’s optimism about the next five to ten years is rooted in the belief that we have the tools, data and momentum to improve not just a handful of care processes, but thousands.
Topics Marc and Peggy explore include:
- How a Transactional Mindset Undermines Quality: Marc sees what he calls “transactional” care as a design flaw that reduces care to disconnected snippets, leaving patients confused and providers unable to coordinate or focus on wellness.
- Clinical Decision Support as a Design Solution: Embedding quality into the care process is preferable to measuring quality after-the-fact.
- The Limits of Traditional Quality Measurement: Retrospective scoring frustrates clinicians and fails to drive real-time improvement. A better way is possible!
- Redesigning Hospitalization: Marc highlights how better logistics, financial models and care coordination—like hospital-at-home—could reduce unnecessary stays and improve transitions of care.
Marc’s contagious optimism envisions a future of exponential progress—thousands of improvements driven by built-in quality, not add-ons.
And the Toyota Production System, the Danaher Business System, other very successful models are predicated on, How do you build quality into the process as it’s happening, have the ability to pull the chain and stop the production line if something isn’t working, and continuously improve it?
How do you stop and say, Okay, why are so many of our patients not being fully treated for their congestive heart failure? What is in the way? How do we improve it?
Dive Deeper
Timestamps
(02:57) Fragmentation and Transactional Care
(07:04) Incentives and Profit Maximization
(10:52) What Real-Time Data Helps Clinicians Achieve
(19:34) Turning Clinical Insight into Actionable Care Plans
(23:30) Encouraging Innovation and Trailblazing
(29:12) Peggy’s Reflections
