Halvorson: 'We need to truly reform healthcare'

Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson isn't one to mince words. While he is all for decreasing the cost of healthcare in the U.S., he also believes that that won't occur until the care to patients improves. In Monday's keynote address at HIMSS09 in Chicago, Halvorson called for a "systematic" approach to fixing the healthcare system.

When the reward for doing things the right way is less money, Halvorson said, "it's hard to get hospitals behind this. But before we can ration care, we need to improve care."

Halvorson called the healthcare in America an "inconsistent, uncoordinated, unmeasured, marginally accountable non-system of care," citing that there are more than 50 million uninsured people in the U.S., and 20 million underinsured. "We have 18,000 billing codes for procedures, but not one billing code for a cure," he said. He believes that in order to improve the system, four things will be necessary: medical best practices, caregiver coordination, consistent follow-through and computers to improve delivery.

Aside from those things, Halvorson added that we need care in America that is based on best practices and best science. He was disgusted with an Institute of Medicine goal that stated that 90 percent of care in the U.S. should be based on scientific evidence by 2020, calling it both compromised and sobering.

"What if we said that by 2020 we wanted 90 percent of all court cases in America to be based on the law?" Halvorson asked. "Now how ridiculous does that sound?"

Halvorson pointed to the success that Kaiser has had in adopting interactive systems for care as just part of the effort to win this battle with healthcare. He said that all of Kaiser's doctors work only with electronic medical records now, and that those EMRs are available to both doctors and the health plan's 10 million patients.