Post-Truth Killed a President

The Oxford dictionary’s 2016 word of the year was “post-truth”, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’”.¹

In that light, I would characterize medical care that follows misdirected conventions, unwarranted opinions, or bias driven by commercial benefit as “post-truth” healthcare.

Post-truth decisions can result in unnecessary morbidity and premature deaths. This phenomenon is not new.

In the mid 1860’s in England, Joseph Lister began saving lives by instituting sterile surgical techniques. The techniques were rapidly adopted across Europe, but in America the advances met significant resistance based on little more than surgical hubris and regional conventions.²

This imperviousness to the evidence meant that after President Garfield was shot in 1881, his wound was explored by numerous physicians with bare hands and unsterilized instruments.

Medical historians have concluded that his death was an iatrogenic (caused by medical care) infection, clearly a “post-truth” fatality. But that was a long time ago. Has the speed of medical adoption of proven treatments improved?

In 2000, an Institute of Medicine report found that it takes an average of 17 years to implement proven clinical research results into mainstream medical practice.³ In 2003, the Institute of Medicine established a comprehensive system’s approach to address this and other ineffective aspects of healthcare.⁴

Thirteen years later our healthcare is even more expensive and there are clear signs that our population’s health has deteriorated further compared to the rest of the developed world.⁵

Why has technology (including an estimated total of $3 trillion invested in electronic medical records through 2016) and revolutionary scientific discoveries failed to spark a revolution in our health status?

We believe the answer is that medicine has become increasingly mired in a product-centric paradigm that isn’t working for either patients’ health or those paying for the bills.

By shifting our employers to a more outcome-oriented paradigm, we can both enhance the health of their beneficiaries and also reduce healthcare costs.

Breakthrough To Better,
Carl

¹2016 word of the year
²1880’s medical care
³Slow rate of adoption for proven medical research
⁴Shortfalls in the quality of healthcare
⁵Life expectancy declines

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Switch Conversations is a bi-weekly blog exclusively for potential employer partners.

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