Our September 21meeting was held at Nelson Mullins’ offices in Washington, D.C.
We focused on a comparison of the U.S. health system with the systems of other countries in an effort to see what can be learned for U.S. policy development from the positive and negative experiences of other parts of the world. Our two primary speakers who led this discussion were: 1) Lloyd Brodsky, who is a solutions architect at Optum, the IT subsidiary of United Health. He has a doctorate in health care management and management information systems from MIT/Sloan and is a recurring speaker at Health Tech Net. 2) Jay Shiver, who has extensive experience in healthcare as a hospital and health system executive, physician practice management executive, consultant and for the past decade an assistant professor at George Mason University.
The United States is the only first world country without a universal health care system. It also has the most expensive health system and the one with the most people slipping between the cracks. There is now increasing interest in some kind of Federal plan to cover everybody in the U.S. But if you look a little closer, there is a lot of diversity in how other countries go about accomplishing that goal. This session focused on what we can learn from the experiences of other countries. Jay talked about what various affluent countries have in common in their universal health systems, and Lloyd talked about the differences among them. We also discussed the use of technology in these different systems.