Connected Health Symposium 2009 Wrap-up

I attended the Connected Health Symposium last week in Boston and got a healthy dose of the past, present and future in health care connectivity, connectedness and connections.  As always, I enjoyed connecting in person with a whole host of folks I know online — including those who know my twitter handle, @healthblawg, better than my name.

The conference was kicked off by Stuart Altman, who regaled us with tales of his days with the Nixon Administration, and made a couple of key points:

• The health care spending crisis is cased by rising prices, not rising utilization
• Any federal health insurance reform will cause cost-shifting to the privately insured, the states, the young
• Therefore the key to successful reform lies in reforming the payment system as well as the delivery system; otherwise we’re “trying to grow flowers in a toxic environment.”
• Value-based purchasing (P4P), gainsharing, global payments are reasonable options for payment reform
• Incentives for providers to use home-based systems will help heal the system at large, and promote connected health, which in turn promotes quality and efficiency

(But n.b.: while remote monitoring and home care will improve quality and reduce cost overall, it is not necessarily cost-effective for every patient.)

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