In this special Speaker Series, Becker's Healthcare caught up with Eric Meizlish, co-founder, president and chief strategy officer of Lumere, formerly known as Procured Health.
Mr. Meizlish will speak during the Becker's Hospital Review 4th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference on "Chicago Companies Leading the Way in Hospital IT Innovation," at 10:45 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 22. Learn more about the event and register to attend in Chicago.
Question: How does your organization gain physician buy-in when it is implementing a new technology or solution?
Eric Meizlish: A major benefit of our solutions is to help hospital systems drive appropriate utilization of medical devices and drugs. There's an industrywide overutilization of features and technologies that inflate cost but do not improve outcomes. A common misperception is that physicians are ambivalent about economic factors — in fact, we've found that a vast majority of doctors actually want to actively contribute to the "solution" of higher-value care delivery. However, to capitalize, it's vital to empower physicians by making comprehensive, unbiased information accessible about both clinical and economic factors. [It is important to] treat the physician as the principal decision maker. In doing so, we've found that physicians are often both champions of our solutions as well as cost-effective, value-accretive devices, drugs and therapies.
Q: What do you see as the most vulnerable part of a hospital's business?
EM: Hospitals need to maintain patient volumes and mitigate share losses to alternate venues of care. However, convenience and cost are driving patients away in droves. Narrowing networks will accelerate this migration. Breaking the trend will require removing overhead and variable costs, rebuilding operating models, improving patient experience and refocusing the discussion on the hospital's competitive advantage — namely that they have superior resources to provide care.
Q: What's the best thing you've read lately?
EM: The most recent letter from Jeff Bezos to Amazon shareholders focuses on high standards. His analysis of both why high standards are important and how to create a culture that prioritizes them demonstrates why Amazon has achieved such remarkable success and why betting against them is a fool's errand. But I think it's even more instructive for healthcare, where the stakes are often substantial and the "customers" at their most vulnerable. It's not sufficient to focus solely on patient outcomes [and] overlook patient experience, value and cost; high standards must apply to the whole operation simply because they are contagious. They build on themselves and can be self fulfilling because organizations with high standards attract people of high standards in all functions. Amazon strives to serve the multidimensional needs of its customers, and our healthcare system ought to as well.