Reducing costs, telehealth, mental health and the impact COVID-19 played on hospitals, staff and the public were the core topics discussed by five top Connecticut healthcare executives during a Thursday morning forum in Hartford.
The 90-minute forum titled “Imagining Better Healthcare Innovation Trends” was sponsored by the Connecticut Health Council. It was moderated by Annie Lamont, wife of Gov. Ned Lamont and co-founder and managing partner at Oak HC/FT, a Greenwich-based venture and equity firm.
The panelists – who spoke before about 75 people at Hartford’s Infinity Music Hall – all agreed the previous ways of doing business in health care need to change. The biggest promoter of that change was Hartford HealthCare President and CEO Jeff Flaks who reiterated several times that the healthcare system as we know it was broken and that only innovative solutions could fix it.
“The most important discussion we can have is that health care is broken and fragmented,” Flaks said in response to a question Lamont raised on reducing healthcare costs. “Health care is not affordable and the system has to change. The most important thing that has to change is to be paid for outcomes, not fee for services. We need to incentivize care.”
Echoing Flaks’ sentiments was Dr. Syed Hussain, senior vice president and chief clinical officer for Trinity Health of New England, who told the audience that “costs are spiraling out of control. As healthcare leaders, the onus is on us to be more fiscally responsible and have better costs for consumers.”
The panelists agreed that Connecticut health providers and the Lamont administration outperformed other states when it came to fighting the global health pandemic.
“Looking back at that time, we were able to get PCR tests up and running quickly here in Connecticut,” said panelist Dr. Charles Lee, scientific director and professor of Jackson Laboratory for Genomics Medicine in Farmington. “We did 2 million tests for the state of Connecticut and were able to get results back to patients within 24 hours. In other parts of the country, it took a week. We had control of our destiny; lesson learned.”
Panelist Dr. Bruce Liang, interim CEO of UConn Health and the dean of medicine at the UConn School of Medicine, said support from the highest levels in the state was crucial.
“We had that support from the top (Gov. Lamont) and it was critical. It was a great public health collaboration,” Liang said.
Virtual and telehealth services were examples of how medicine is changing and perceived and was spurred on by the pandemic, many agreed.
“Telehealth needs to be embraced, and that is especially true in vulnerable communities. Care is more and more local now,” Hussain said. “We need to embrace the tools that were unleashed from the pandemic.”
Dr. Juan Salazar, executive vice president and physician-in-chief at Connecticut Children’s medical center, said telehealth with developmental pediatrics “has been spectacular. It’s about 80% virtual.”
While Salazar expressed support for telehealth services, he also lamented that there needs to be a balance.
“There is also something about that contact with a patient, a kid, that you need,” Salazar said. “You can embrace technology, but you can’t forget about humanity.”
The need to address mental health, the panelists said, is greater now than ever before. That need was amplified by COVID-19, they said.
“[Dealing with mental health concerns] happened across all industries, but when it happens in health care it’s more challenging,” Flaks said. “Medical schools, nursing schools and dental schools need to expand and we need to be an enabler for them to expand. That is our challenge.”
Liang said the stress among front-line workers has been enormous and that more mental health services need to be offered.
“Physician suicide is twice as high as other parts of the population,” Liang said.
