Create a Healthcare System People Love

In 2014, when I told my mentor ( Jonathan Fisher, MD, MPH ) that I was thinking about leaving traditional practice in the Emergency Department to create Call9 but was unsure if it was the right choice, he said to me:

?“If you leave here, someone will immediately take your place and save the lives that you would have saved and teach the students that you would have taught. If you don’t leave, you won’t save lives that would otherwise not be saved.”?

He helped me articulate my purpose. It was no longer a decision to leave; it was now an inevitability.

The leap of faith took me off of the front line of the ER and threw me into a world in which my daily work challenges the very foundation of what healthcare is. As a healthtech entrepreneur, the dysfunction of the system creates an opportunity to invent smarter, faster, and more dignified new solutions. It presents an opportunity to make companies and products that can make the system more fair, more just, more desirable. To capture the opportunity, I’ve built teams for my companies by evangelizing a clear mission:?

‘Do right by the patient, and all else will fall into place.’?

The people I’ve surrounded myself with sign onto that mission and believe that the world can be different because they have seen their own hands changing it. Healthcare clinicians and professionals have left their jobs to join these companies and disrupt the very industry they previously dedicated their careers to; and more importantly, after they are done working for one of these companies that I’ve founded or led, many have moved on to found and lead companies of their own, scaling our impact. Business partners have become ‘early adopters,’ and changed the rules of the way they operate to work with us and be our clients, signing contracts that have language never seen before, asking their employees to work in new ways, and taking risks by giving us the chance to prove ourselves and giving us the safety to fail (as so many innovations must before they succeed). Investors have fueled the momentum. Academic researchers have studied and published the results of our work to improve the user experience and decrease the cost of the healthcare system. And Congress has written legislation to enable many of these changes to take place at scale. As an entrepreneur, I am no longer an individual contributor, but instead one of the leaders of a movement. We are a community of believers and we won’t stop working until we see systemic change.

Through these experiences, I’ve come to understand that the problem with healthcare is not a people problem, it is a systems problem. No one person is to blame - it’s the system that is designed poorly. Now, as an advocate and designer, I get to think about - and act on - systems change. And central to this work is the belief that the healthcare system is not ‘broken,’ as so many say; it is working exactly as designed, it was just designed poorly.

Next year, I will publish a book on how we might move forward as a nation by changing the foundation of how we incentivize providing healthcare in the US. My goal is to convince you, the reader, to join the community of believers that we can change the way the healthcare system works to be better for all of us.

The alternative to change is an experience that continues to be harmful, unfair, fractured, and inequitable; this experience is also financially unsustainable and is the major driver of our country’s debt and subsequent political divisiveness. We deserve better. We have the power to make the change. To do so, we must learn why the system works the way it does and apply those lessons to designing a new way of paying for, delivering, and receiving healthcare.?

Please join me on this journey. Sign up for the early distribution list here or scan the QR code in the graphic.

I hope this is the beginning of the most powerful discourse of my life and can’t wait to fundamentally change the system with you into something that people actually want.

• Tim