François de Brantes is the Executive Director of the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute (HCI3), and a staunch advocate of incorporating new motivations within healthcare.
According to Brantes, motivation fuels any professional, with morals and ethics steering the ship so to speak. As people, our motivation is to achieve certain goals. And as doctors, we’re guided by at least two primary goals–stay in business and take care of patients. Thanks to falling Medicare payments and rising cost of overhead, though, the staying in business part has taken precedence, and led to primary care physicians bringing on more and more patients. In turn this compromises the more satisfying, and important, concern–making patients healthier. Ideally, if health care professionals were free to realize that second motivation, we’d have a situation where really good care is readily available, and affordable. But that’s not the situation. And it’s clear that something’s gone wrong.
Read Brantes complete blog post here. He calls out the payment system in place as a possible culprit of demotivation. We’re not ones to disagree with his thinking. Only difference is that his group wants to change it, whereas we just threw it out entirely.
HCI3 aims to improve health care quality and value with evidence-based incentive programs and a fair and powerful model for payment reform.
Photo of François de Brantes courtesy of ManagedCareMag.com