Creating Value in Emergency Medicine

Lucinda Lai, MD

Resident in Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at MGH and BWH

PGY-3

01/28/2020

Emergency Medicine physicians joint the Value-Based Health
care Delivery Course to discuss innovative ways to improve
patient care. 

Three years after graduating from medical school, it was quite the surreal experience to step back into a classroom and be taught by world-class professors at Harvard Business School’s Value-Based Healthcare Delivery course. After three years of on-the-job learning and figuring out clinical medicine at the bedside, it was refreshing to participate in a course that reminds me of the larger structures in which medicine is practiced. The Value-Based Healthcare Delivery course gave me a higher-level perspective of where healthcare is headed in the next 10, 20, 30 years. The challenges of reforming the U.S. healthcare system loom large, but I am inspired by my peers in emergency medicine (pictured below), who still wholeheartedly believe that healthcare is a human right, even as the costs of providing that care continue to rise. The key is to figure out how to accurately measure those costs and create value where there is opportunity to increase efficiency in the system.