Healthcare
Healthcare
Meet Your Host, Alan Weiss
Alan Weiss is one of those rare people who can say he is a consultant, speaker, and author and mean it.
His consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients such as Merck, Hewlett-Packard, GE, Mercedes-Benz, State Street Corporation, Times Mirror Group, The Federal Reserve, The New York Times Corporation, Toyota, and over 500 other leading organizations. He has served on several boards of directors in various capacities.
His prolific publishing includes over 500 articles and 60 books, including his best-seller, Million Dollar Consulting (from McGraw-Hill) now in its 30th year and sixth edition. His newest is Your Legacy is Now: Life is not about a search for meaning but the creation of meaning (Routledge, 2021). His books have been on the curricula at Villanova, Temple University, and the Wharton School of Business, and have been translated into 15 languages.
Get to know AlanShow Notes
- We’re seeing huge changes in healthcare.
- About 25% of patients used telehealth last year, far exceeding the 5% who accessed care this way before the pandemic.
- Pharmacies with physicians present (like pet stores with vets present)
- Physicians in private practice greatly reduced.
- The share of doctors who worked in practices wholly owned by physicians fell from 60.1% to 46.7% from 2012 to 2022.
- More people seeing nurse practitioners
- From 2016 to 2021, the number of primary care physicians billing Medicare declined each year, from 142,000 physicians in 2016 to 135,000 physicians in 2021.
- Physicians tell me that the paperwork, reimbursement bureaucracy, and corporate demands are terrible. Example: 5-8 minutes allowed for patient questions during visits.
- Some exceptions: dermatologists have modestly increased. There are no midnight emergencies for dermatologists.
- Faith in the medical establishment has been undermined by the conflicting medical and political decisions during and after COVID.
- Religious institutions, education, and medicine have all suffered damage to their integrity.
- Patient costs are rising in terms of copays and over coverage denied by insurers.
- The limited government data available suggests that, overall, insurers deny between 10% and 20% of the claims they receive
- When I consulted with RI Hospital it started every year in the red by $14 million because they were required to provide care to indigents.
- Recent studies of medical errors have estimated errors may account for as many as 251,000 deaths annually in the United States, making medical errors the third leading cause of death.
- Sepsis is a leading cause of death in hospitals.
- Emergency room waits can be 12 hours and worse.
- It wasn’t all that long ago that doctors were not washing their hands between seeing patients!
Alan Weiss’s The Uncomfortable Truth® is a weekly broadcast from “The Rock Star of Consulting,” Alan Weiss, who holds forth with his best (and often most contrarian) ideas about society, culture, business, and personal growth. His 60+ books in 12 languages, and his travels to, and work in, 50 countries contribute to a fascinating and often belief-challenging 20 minutes that might just change your next 20 years.
Introduction to the show recorded by Connie Dieken
