Courage and resolution are the spirit and soul of virtue. - Thomas Fuller
At MHA's annual membership meeting this week, we presented our Distinguished Service Award to the teams of caregivers at Maryland's three designated Ebola treatment centers, along with the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. In a video presentation during the awards ceremony, we had a chance to hear directly from some of the nurses and doctors who stepped up to battle this deadly illness.
Without exception, these brave women and men spoke of the work as a duty, a calling - the very essence of why they chose the professions that they did, and reflective of the Fuller quote above, which is inscribed on the awards themselves. Their spirit in service of a greater purpose was echoed by the meeting's two guest speakers - Paul Keckley, Ph.D., and Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen.
Keckley, a health care economist, talked about how old, fee-for-service models are, simply, moot. The future of health care, he said, is nonprofit work ... or, more accurately, profit with purpose. As an example, CVS, which forfeited about $2 billion in revenue when it stopped selling tobacco products, has since seen an annual increase in revenue of about $15 billion.
Dr. Wen touched on how, for the first time in her life, the conversation about community health has been elevated to a national level. Baltimore's recent unrest and other incidents throughout the nation have brought into the public's consciousness the major role that social factors play in a community's health. This is now a unique opportunity to effect lasting, positive change, an effort that aligns perfectly with Maryland's waiver agreement.
Dr. Wen spoke of a patient she had encountered as an emergency department physician, a woman struggling with substance abuse. Dr. Wen would provide the appropriate medical treatments, over and over, until one day, her patient overdosed and could not be revived.
Dr. Wen said she wonders if more could have been done to address the roots of her patient's problem, rather than just the symptoms she was displaying during any of her multiple emergency department visits. This idea is at the core of population health - that effective treatment of a patient, and a community, means addressing the upstream factors that go beyond illness and injury and, in many cases, beyond the traditional scope of hospitals' and physicians' work.
This is an idea that Maryland's hospitals have embraced over the first 18 months of the modernized waiver. As Keckley put it during his remarks, the nation is watching.
Having had the chance to spend at least a bit of time with so many of you at the meeting, I was struck by a markedly different tone from last year's gathering. Last year, we had just modernized the Medicare waiver and were searching for the right path forward. This week, there was a greater sense of confidence that we are heading in the right direction. With our purpose clear, it's no longer a question of where to go, but how to sustain the forward momentum we'll need to get there.