By Carolyn Gray Anderson
With the health care industry growing faster than any other job sector (representing 13 percent of U.S. jobs added since 2010, and 15 percent in California), the timing was perfect for UCLA Anderson’s inaugural health care conference. UCLA Anderson’s Healthcare Business Association organized it with premium sponsorship from Blue Shield of California, Amgen and others, along with the collaboration of many other Anderson groups and UCLA affiliates.
The conference featured keynotes by Dr. Neil Solomon, vice president for Quality and Care System Transformation at Blue Shield of California; Thomas Priselac, president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Health System; and Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO of XPRIZE Foundation, with which UCLA Health System is advancing an organ preservation program.
The program opened with Dean Judy Olian’s introduction of Dr. David Feinberg, whose range of responsibilities encompass president of UCLA Health System, CEO of UCLA Hospital System and associate vice chancellor of UCLA Health Sciences. Feinberg was complimentary in his comments about the students’ adept organization of a conference that highlighted business opportunities in the health sector and covered bases from emerging markets in technology and biopharma to providers’ critical decisions to policy. “But you got the conference all wrong,” he teased. “There’s nothing about patients!”
Qualifying his critique, Feinberg urged the audience to “Pretend you’re a 53-year-old unemployed African American male, or a 32-week old preemie. When your life changes like that, what matters are the people around you. Do they greet you? Do you spend a lot of time waiting? Or do you spend a lot of time getting taken care of?”
Despite the emphasis on business and industry and the burgeoning opportunities for MBAs, the big takeaway from the conference was how to put the humanity back into health care. One of Feinberg’s concerns is that patients need to be involved in the entire process of their care in ways they never did in the past.
Echoing this sentiment, Blue Shield’s Solomon said, “The health care system is getting harder to use at a time when we crave and expect convenience. It’s too complicated for most people.” We get out of the “mess,” he said, if we “work together instead of apart. Share solutions that are not at cross purposes, including from a business perspective.” Sheer economics will require substantive changes in care, as more and more Americans struggle to afford insurance.”
Presentations and conversations were infused with both excitement and concern about the extent to which technology is forcing the industry to adapt to consumers’ expectations, abilities and basic needs. But with globalization here to stay, does it matter where innovation is taking place as long as it’s happening?
In a TED-like presentation over lunch, Diamandis evoked both jubilance and apprehension when talking about the latest developments in what he called “exponential technologies.” With a background as a physician, his priority is to focus on the most rapidly growing technologies and “incentivize people to drive breakthroughs.” Those breakthroughs include super computers that process vast archives of medical knowledge to put it at consumers’ fingertips, and robotic surgeons that can render the cost of an operation equal, essentially, to the cost of the electricity needed to power it.
Asked whether he’s concerned that artificial intelligence might “run away from us” and actually start manipulating us for the worse, Diamandis reminded the audience that throughout history, technology has almost always been heralded as a threat. Even printing presses were received with skepticism by many.
“Our risk aversion costs lives,” he said, noting that nearly three million people connected online possess just as much knowledge and information as Larry Page. The average citizen has the ability to do individually what only governments and large organizations could do 20 years ago. And the only industries and companies that survive, he predicted, will be data-driven enterprises.
In the end, Diamandis — who witnessed first hand the impersonal and coldly clinical “care” his father, as an Alzheimer’s patient, was receiving when he broke his pelvis — chimed in with the other speakers to extoll the great connectedness of people. He advocated for letting machines aggregate, amass and democratize the useful data while robots attend to our most isolated medical needs; but he said, “People should be relating to each other as people.”
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