'There's No Money In Wellness'

Today I got myself acquainted with Capitol Hill by attending the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing entitled "Crossing the Quality Chasm in Health Reform."

The hearing was a follow-up to a 2001 Institute of Medicine report that defined six goals to improve health care: safety, effectiveness, timeliness, efficiency, patient-centered and equitability that should be part of any health care reform passed by Congress.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking piece of information came as I arrived at the Dirksen Senate Office Building to wait in line for the hearing.

I met a man who was sitting in line as a place holder for a lobbyist (only 60 visitors are allowed in). The man commented that health-related hearings often have long lines of lobbyists waiting to get into them, but ones such as today's that are focused on wellness rather than sickness are usually not popular, “because there’s no money in wellness,” he said.

Sure enough, the panel of three doctors, a professor and the president of The Commonwealth Fund highlighted several ways to improve health care on the front end of the health cycle. Among their recommendations:

• Create teams of doctors, nurses and other health professionals working across disciplines to more fully serve patients’ needs.


• Report not only the results of new health initiatives, but also the outcome of those initiatives. For example, hospitals may be successful in instituting a new treatment for a disease, but how many patients actually benefited from it?


• Focus more on behavioral health issues, as they can be a precursor to other medical issues later on. According to panelist Dr. Rhonda Robinson Beale, chief medical officer of OptumHealth Behavioral Solutions, as many as 40% of patients have both behavioral and other health issues.


• Improve health information technology by investing in research into technologies such as a hand-held device for doctors to access patients' records and diagnose potential conflicts between medicines before they occur, among other capabilities.

For more information, including full audio of the hearing, visit HELP's Web site.

-Elizabeth Galentine