Putting Patients at the Center of Value Based Health Care.

Richard Huang, MD

Clinical Informatics Fellow

Department of Pathology

Massachusetts General Hospital 

Harvard Medical School

PGY 5

01/25/2020

I have been told by those who are older and wiser that I should not pursue anything that I am not willing to get up every day at 6AM for.

I gladly woke up every day at 5AM for this.

I was very fortunate to have received COE’s grant to attend the 3-day Harvard Business School (HBS) Value Based Health

care Delivery (VBHD) course. In medical school, we were taught all the scientific knowledge that we needed to know, and all the technical skills that we needed to have. However, it was only during residency, and now fellowship, that it became crystal clear to me that as physicians, we don’t actually practice medicine---we practice healthcare.

Medicine is science. Healthcare is business. Which is why it was wholly apt to learn about healthcare transform

ations from the preeminent business scholars in the field.

I used to think that as a physician, my only duty is to make the world a better place one patient at a time. That illusion was shattered when I realized the institutionalized disincentives that are in place that prevented us from delivering the best possible care for our patients. The VBHD course at HBS helped me crystalize those feelings through theoretical lectures and real life case studies. However, I don’t view the course as a merchant of despair, but a rather a clarion call for a better way of practicing healthcare where we can realign the incentives to maximize patient centered outcomes and minimize healthcare delivery costs through better cost accounting and personnel utilization.

Now, my job as a physician is to make the world a better place one patient at a time AND to drive the necessary systematic changes to healthcare so that we can provide the best possible care for our patients. To me that means delivering patient-centered value based care, and fostering a culture that is worthy of the trust that patients have put in us to save their lives and make them healthy again. From now on, I will vigorously defend the patient-first strategy to creating value: when you get the patient experience right, everything else will fall into place.