Meta Messages
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Overarching Messages
- Through alarming national studies and reports, Americans have been awakened to the very real problems in medicine and health care delivery: from escalating costs to significant gaps in quality and patient safety. We’re aware of the problems, but what are the solutions?
- Remaking American Medicine™… Health Care for the 21st Century (RAM), a four-part television series intended for broadcast on PBS in the fall of 2006, explores the quality crisis in health care and reveals innovative solutions being undertaken by providers and consumers. These individuals and institutions are known as Champions of Change.
- The goal of the series is to inspire and empower viewers, by demonstrating what transforming the quality of health care can mean to them and their families. The series takes an approach that does not seek to assign blame, but to call attention to solutions.
- While RAM highlights positive change and transformation happening in different sectors of America’s health care delivery system, it simultaneously reveals that our nation lacks a coordinated roadmap to quality health care.
- The series seeks to inspire consumers, health care providers, insurers, business leaders and policy-makers to work together to create this roadmap that will transform American medicine for the better. For example:
- Health care providers, including physicians, hospitals and health clinics, need to embrace quality improvement while working with patients and purchasers to create a more accountable, higher-performing health care system.
- Purchasers need to ensure a fair payment system that rewards quality and recognizes efforts to improve, while holding providers accountable for the care they are delivering.
- Consumers need to take more control over their own health care decisions for themselves and their families by becoming active partners with their health care providers.
Audience-Specific Messages
Health care Providers (physicians, nurses, etc.)
- Improving the quality of health care will foster a deeper relationship between patient and provider and help to restore the trust that has been lost between consumers and the health care system.
- Remaking American Medicine presents examples of how providers and patients are working together to restore confidence in the quality of health care.
- Health care providers are committed to offering the best possible care. But often the systems they must work with and within do not support this same commitment. Innovative providers develop what they call “work arounds”. These are other methods of getting the right care at the right time to all who need it by going around stumbling blocks that might inhibit appropriate care.
Business Community (private purchasers)
- Employers are as concerned about cost as they are quality because they expect a return on their investment. Many businesses use their investment in health care as a business strategy, recognizing that providing quality health care attracts more qualified personnel while supporting employee retention.
- Improvement in health care quality also improves quality of life. This is an important consideration for employers because better health care helps ensure more productive employees and reduces costs associated with lost/sick days.
- Employers know that quality health care improves the community making it a better place to do business.
- Pay for performance and consumer-directed care are areas of growing interest and investment by the business community. Giving employees health care choices and rewarding providers of quality care are two key levers business leaders are effectively using to impact quality improvement.
Hospital Administrators
- Enlightened hospital administrators recognize that improving quality of care will represent a survival strategy for their operations as consumers take more control of where they will seek health care.
- Improving health care requires management of a number of sometimes competing forces within institutions and is mostly driven by the availability of resources.
- Forward thinking administrators are working to better understand health care quality from the public’s point of view. Many are more receptive to engaging patient- and family-centered care advocates in redesigning their operations.
- Today’s health care system is ineffective and wasteful because it doesn’t truly measure how well it meets performance standards.
