Local health leaders gather at Lipscomb to discuss conflict in health care
Janel Shoun |
David Osborn, executive director of the Health Care Solutions Group, a new institute sponsored by Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Nashville Health Care Council, told participants at Lipscomb University’s first annual health care conference that conflict in health care is not going to go away in the future.
The health care conference was coordinated by the Institute for Conflict Management and included participants from the nursing, medical, legal and administrative realms of health care.
Osborn, whose organization works to bring health care, business and government leaders together to lead improvement in the U.S. health care system, painted a pretty bleak picture of the current status and an even bleaker picture of the future if no steps are taken.
Currently almost 16 percent of America’s population nationwide is uninsured, Osborn noted. One study showed that Americans get a reasonable level of quality health care only about half the time, and other studies show that despite spending the most money on health care in the world., compared to other nations, America isn’t doing that great.
He also predicted several areas full of the potential of conflict for the future:
The aging of the baby boomers will bring about a gap of $44 trillion in unfunded health care needs by 2030;
Medical care for the last year of life makes up 10-12 percent of all of America’s medical costs, begging the question, when does it become too costly to keep a patient alive?; and
The nursing shortage is expected to be 340,000 by 2020, three times larger than any labor shortage America has experienced before; and
Challenges in the future include more competition, more malpractice and a growing distrust in pharmaceutical companies and the government.
How to address such difficult challenges? Randy Lowry, president of Lipscomb University, lawyer, and founder of two institutes for conflict management, made some suggestions base on his years of experience settling disputes around the world.
First parties involved in any dispute must move away from focusing on the issues and work to address the real interests of the parties involved. People tend to take firm positions on one side or the other of an issue, but if asked what their real interest is, an alternative solution can usually be found, he said.
Parties should also focus their energy not on competition but on creativity, and be willing to act in counter-intuitive ways when it serves the purpose of collaboration, Lowry said.
“We can be competitive and handle things the way we have been, or we can be collaborators and have better outcomes in some cases,” he said.
Attendees also participants in break-out sessions to address issues within their specific realm of the industry and heard a talk by Linda Gallindo, president of Versera Performance Consulting.