March 6, 2015

Lown Institute Right Care conference: we’re treating lab results – not patients

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Dr. Allen Frances, Lown Institute, Right Care Conference

I’ll be attending the Lown Institute’s Right Care conference in San Diego next week. Come back to this blog for future blog posts and maybe even some video interviews from this event.

On the Institute’s website, I found a Q & A with Allen Frances, MD, professor emeritus and former chair of psychiatry at Duke. Excerpt:

“We’ve substituted expensive high-tech care that does more harm than good for patients and lost is the human aspect of patient care. We have too much medicine performed in uncoordinated ways. Some high-tech, high revenue-generating specialists are primarily concerned with their specialized organ system, not the whole patient. Our reward system is screwed up, too. When medical students get out of school having $200,000 in debt, they are incentivized to go into a high-paying specialties and to perform high-generating procedures. It would be better if we had more primary care providers and fewer specialists.”

I’m looking forward to connecting with several of our HealthNewsReview.org contributors at the conference, including: Susan Molchan, MD; Christine Norton, MA; and Michael Wilkes, MD, PhD.

And, from the Baby Boomers for Balanced Health Care project based here in Minnesota, Bill Doherty, PhD of the University of Minnesota, and Bill Adams, lobbyist and health policy activist.

Plus the chance to hear Harlan Krumholz, Steve Nissen, Jerry Hoffman, Judy Norsigian, Angelo Volandes, David Newman and many others.

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