Member Newsletter

The meeting included opening remarks from Nancy Desmond, Chief Executive Officer; Newt Gingrich, Founder; and Donald W. Fisher, PhD., President and CEO of AMGA; a keynote speech from Chris Kryder, MD, Chief Executive Officer of D2Hawkeye; and 4 panel discussions covering the following areas:

• Emerging Tools to Prevent Disease and Encourage Wellness,

• Empowering Individuals with Chronic Disease to Live Active and Healthy Lives, Improving Options for Individuals with Complex and Life Threatening Diseases, and

• Long Term Living – Delivering Superior Senior Care to Enable Healthy Active Living

Panel 1

The first panel, moderated by CHT Project Director Laura Linn, featured Ron Loeppke, MD, Executive Vice President at Matria Healthcare, Inc.: Fred Williams, Director of Benefits and Strategic Alliances at Quest Diagnostics; and Jeffrey Gulcher, MD, PhD, Chief Scientist of deCODE genetics Inc. The panelists each presented a transformational solution to address the challenges facing emerging tools to prevent disease and encourage wellness, including:

CHT Vice President of Operations, Melissa Ferguson, moderated the second panel on empowering individuals with chronic disease to live active and healthy lives. Virginia Gurley, MD, MPH, Vice President and Senior Medical Director at Healthways; Mike Sokol, MD, Managing Director of Health Management Innovations at GlaxoSmithKline, and Mark Rumans, MD, Physician in Chief at Billings Clinic each presented their transformational solutions:

• Delivering the right message, to the right person, through the right channel, at the right point, in time, through social networks;

• Improving medication adherence by recognizing the impact of pharmacy benefit design; and

• Redesigning diabetes/metabolic care delivery using the Chronic Care Model developed by Ed Wagner, MD.

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Panel 3

• Recognizing that it is not the technology that makes chronic disease management work, it is the redesign of health care, a team approach in an integrated organization, and spreading the work out over a team of professionals;

• Developing standards like those at Blue Distinction Centers, which are selected on the basis of meeting evidence-based thresholds for clinical care and processes;

• Combining evidenced-based treatments with scientifically supported complementary therapies; and

• Caring for the whole person – body, mind, and spirit 

• Incorporating Care Transitions Intervention^SM based on the work of Dr. Eric Coleman, implemented in both FFS and Managed Care settings;

• Using transition coaches to provide simple tools and support to patients and caregivers during transition from hospital to home;

• Empowering and educating patients through self management intervention;

• Encouraging the growth and adoption of companies such as Fidelis that would manage Medicare resources on a risk basis, “marry” expert physicians practicing evidence based medicine to a care management model and partner with those physicians to deliver demonstrably better care at lower cost to high risk population;

• Allowing companies that prove this paradigm to expand into the community, overlay comparable clinical models on institutional status members living outside of traditional nursing facilities thus preventing migration of these individuals into increasingly more expensive sites of residence and service; and

• Developing models for Alzheimer’s Disease treatment and prevention development accelerators

Healthways has developed a very personal-oriented model of trying to dramatically improve health by helping people assess themselves, manage their chronic conditions and maximize their health through preventative measures. Healthways focuses on the person before they become a patient in the hopes minimizing patient status. The scale of what Healthways is proposing in developing a Well-Being Index, sampling a thousand people a day, seven days a week, creating annually 365 thousand interviews of data will be an enormous margin, not to mention the largest collection of information about communities, personal behavior, what works and does not work ever gathered anywhere in the world in the area of health.

Photo courtesy of Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions
Pictured left to right:  Ben R. Leedle Jr., President & CEO, Healthways; Vicki Shepard, Sr. VP Strategic & Government Relations, Healthways; Newt Gingrich, Founder, Center for Health Transformation; Katie Bell, Associate Partner, Gallup; Anne Tarpey, ACSW Sr. Consultant Wellbeing & Healthcare, Gallup; Kevin McConville, Regional Managing Partner, Gallup, and Devin Carty, Associate Partner, Gallup.

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April 7 ♦ Key West, FL
Center Project Director David Merritt to speak on Price and Quality Transparency for the Managed Care Executive Group

April 10 ♦ Osage Beach, MO
Center Project Director Laura Linn to speak at the Missouri League of Nursing annual convention

May 13 ♦ Orlando, FL
Center Project Director David Merritt to be a panelist at the Ingenix Health Care Technology Leadership Forum

June 16 ♦ Seattle, WA
CHT Member Meeting - Creating a Healthy Workforce & Community:  Delivering IT to Transform Health & Healthcare