Eight ideas for improving healthcare in Michigan

Business leaders, doctors, healthcare executives, and government leaders filled 50 roundtables and brainstormed how to improve healthcare and cut costs in the region at Crain’s Detroit Health Care Leadership Summit October 15. They produced what Crain’s called Eight Big Ideas.

These include the usual: The technology solution--online health information exchange. The up-supply solution—more primary care providers. The reduce demand solution--make people live more “healthily”--financial incentives for employees to lose weight and quit smoking. The rule of law solution--Michigan should mandate health care price transparency. The down-supply solution--Reduce overcapacity of some facilities.

But Idea 6 shows that lean (but don’t call it that) has gained some traction: “Use skills developed by auto industry engineers to improve efficiencies and streamline processes of hospitals and physician offices to improve quality and reduce costs.”

To me, that’s the root-cause solution.

More: Want greater depth? Click here for the complete unedited speech. NOTE: the unedited speech is 34 minutes long. Other session videos are included on the page.