We all wonder how health care can be improved in patient satisfaction and in lowering our costs.

Today’s C-SPAN presentation on Healthcare Innovation at Pepperdine University in California presented Dr. Eziekiel Emmanuel of the University of Pennsylvania who is the medical ethics and health politics committee chairman.

He has recommendations after several years of experience and informal research on how to improve the patient experience, improve doctor satisfaction and improve the cost of healthcare. Much of that improvement is by reducing the number of trips to the emergency room and number of days in the hospital. 

He has a “Prescription for the Future” in book form that is coming out in June of this year, 2017, which has a number of ideas that have been shown to reduce costs while improving the quality of care and improving the satisfaction of the patients.

One of those improvements has to do with scheduling. He encourages doctors to save some spots in their day’s schedule for today’s call ins so that people do not have to wait so long for their appointments.

And one of the other suggestions is to have behavioral healthcare personnel available at the same location so that people do not have to wander around from one place to the other to get the care that they really want and need in a timely manner.

This transformation he thinks will take about 10 years.

Patient requests for these kinds of improvements in the healthcare system may help move the medical establishment to making these changes instead of waiting for some kind of crisis that forces them into a change.

So scheduling is one of the keys to this transformation.

And secondly, insisting that your doctor have some way, some data driven way of improving their care. So when you call for an appointment or talk with your doctor you might ask what they are doing to make sure their level of care is improving.

Just make sure that you don’t hurt their feelings.

It’s just a matter of helping them do the job that they really would like to do.

So Healthcare Innovations, a C-SPAN program today April 21, 2017, from Pepperdine University with Dr. Eziekiel Emmanuel. And the book that is coming out in June is “Prescription for the Future.”

For the video, see https://youtu.be/wwnEpLmNNaI

We really can improve healthcare and reduce costs!