By Anne Llewellyn, RN-BC, MS, BHSA, CCM, CRRN
Editor-in-Chief of Case in Point Magazine and the Case Management Resource Guide

Last week I attended the annual DMAA Forum in San Diego, where more than 800 high-level professionals gathered to learn, network and share ideas about trends, new products and challenges facing the industry. The sessions were well attended and presented by experts who are leaders in the fields of wellness, population health and prevention.

A major highlight for me was hearing Mark McClellan, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, share his views on where health care reform stands today. He emphatically told the audience that Congress will pass a health care reform package that will allow the industry to move forward in its efforts to provide comprehensive health care to all citizens. He referred to the findings of the report “Bending the Curve” from the Brookings Institution as the elements that we should expect to see in the package. We covered “Bending the Curve” last week in this space — have you had time to review it? I welcome you to leave a comment below or send me an email about how you think it lays out the solution to long-term spending.

Another high point of the meeting was the keynote address by the chair of DMAA’s Board of Directors, Dr. Gordon Norman, who explored a potent issue — namely, how to combine the interventions that are being promoted by various stakeholder groups, a list of interventions that includes the patient-centered medical home, patient-monitoring technology, the electronic medical record, data exchange, physician payment reform, classic disease management, wellness, prevention and consumerism. 

“It is no longer a matter of measuring the return on investment or the impact on quality for the still evolving iterations of each of these individual interventions,” he said, “It’s now a matter of figuring out how to fit these all together into an integrated whole.”

He discussed a concept that he coined: HAPHIE. This stands for High quality, Affordable, Personal Health Improvement for Everyone. He pointed out that we already have all the tools and all the information and all the science we need to provide mass customization for individual health care consumers. Further, there is already plenty of money in the system to provide personalized care on a population-based scale. The challenge facing all in the industry is to fit all the pieces together in an overlapping, mutually self-supportive and synergistic whole.

Tracy Moorhead, executive director of DMAA, implored the audience of health care professionals to document their projects and share these outcomes in the available literature so we as an industry can continue to build the evidence to support the important work taking place across the country. 

As the Editor in Chief of Case In Point, I welcome all articles to support the practice and promise to publish them once received. Data surrounding outcomes is an invaluable part of our work. 

DMAA is always energizing and I look forward to the 2010 show!

Have a great week!