By Evan Falchuk
Writing in the New Yorker, Atul Gawande says we need to get away from focusing on who writes the checks in health care. Instead, we need a health care transformation like that which the Mayo Clinic began some decades ago:
The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”. . . . Mayo promoted leaders who focused first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible. . . . .No one there actually intends to do fewer expensive scans and procedures than is done elsewhere in the country. The aim is to raise quality and to help doctors and other staff members work as a team. But, almost by happenstance, the result has been lower costs.
What is “core tenet” of national health care reform?
