2009 Archive: Session Topics
How Wal-Mart is Health Smart
Marcus Osborne
As the nation’s largest retailer and employer of more than 1.4 million U.S. citizens, Wal-Mart is an organization that takes health care very seriously. From providing low cost medications to customers, to partnering with suppliers and providers to offer better health care solutions for its Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club employees, the company is known for seeking innovative solutions for affordable, high-quality health care. Mr. Osborne’s discussion will focus on Wal-Mart's latest efforts to improve national health care delivery. You’ll hear about the transformation of the pharmaceutical supply chain that allows Wal-Mart to offer $4 prescriptions, as well as other supply chain initiatives that will help the company more efficiently deliver goods and services. You’ll also learn about Wal-Mart’s recent product offering with Dell and eClinicalWorks to provide an electronic medical records solution.
The Qliance Primary Care Prescription
Garrison Bliss, M.D.
Medical care in the U.S. has been criticized as being overpriced and underperforming. Much of this can be attributed to a decline in primary care. Dr. Bliss will discuss Qliance, an innovative “direct practice” solution that shifts the center of financial gravity back to doctors and patients and away from reliance on insurance reimbursement. It opens up the possibility of reinvigorating primary care, reducing health care costs, and increasing health care quality and access.
How Innovation Keeps Allina Thriving During Changing Times
Ken Paulus
Allina Health System is focusing on innovation as one of its core strategies to mitigate the risks and challenges of health care financing and delivery. During this session, you’ll hear how Allina integrates innovation into its mission and business operations. Mr. Paulus will also discuss Allina’s “bridging strategy,” which involves investments in new technologies and services that enable the organization to maintain fiscal health while it successfully adapts to the massive changes in the health care environment.
Embracing Facebook.com-like Software in Health Care
Lou Cornacchia, M.D.
Facebook© and other social networking sites have opened our eyes to the ease-of-use and incredible functionality of multi-tenancy architecture, where software applications can be virtually partitioned for individual users. It has revolutionized and improved our ability to communicate with relatives, friends and business associates. Now it’s about to revolutionize the way we share health care information. In this session, Dr. Lou Cornacchia will tell you about Doctations, a software-as-a-service application that allows physicians, patients, hospitals and others to share the same database of critical information. The days of disparate, siloed servers sitting in various locations or remotely hosted in server farms, is coming to an end. You’ll hear how health care quality, cost and efficiency improve when organizations can share applications such as billing, EMR, and PMS in a partitioned environment.
Advancing Quality through Closed Loop Health Information Systems
Edward K. Shultz, MD
How could you improve your business if you could make better, more informed decisions? With traditional Health Information Systems (HIS) the focus is on automation of transactions, not decision support or invaluable longitudinal analysis. Vanderbilt Medical Center has a new, more effective approach. Dr. Schultz will reveal how Vanderbilt used innovation and ingenuity to implement a series of closed-loop tools that provide decision support and a truly fault-tolerant method of health care delivery. You’ll hear specific examples, straight from the medical center’s massive data warehouse, that prove the value of this breakthrough approach.
Aligning Legal & Ethical Business Practices
Diane Gross
In an increasingly complex legal and ethical environment, Poudre Valley Health System has mastered the art of alignment. In this session, Ms. Gross will discuss an approach for ensuring consistent practices across all business functions -- from front-line employees to the Board of Directors. You’ll discover how Poudre Valley, the sole 2008 Baldrige National Quality Award Recipient for Healthcare, proactively addresses legal and ethical issues in leadership, strategic planning, service excellence, information systems, performance management, organizational development, and process management.
Health Care Reform
George Halvorson
While discussions on the scope and cost of health care reform reach the peak of controversy, Mr. Halvorson weighs in with his ideas about delivering better care right now through smarter goal-setting and process reengineering. During this session, you’ll hear about some of the shocking data and case studies that are published in Mr. Halvorson’s book, Health Care Will Not Reform Itself. You’ll also learn about Mr. Halvorson’s proposed incentives-based, system-supported model for creating consistent care, which includes rewarding health maintenance, mandating universal insurance, and connecting caregivers to high-cost, high-need patients.