IGHI Annual Lecture: Reforming High Risk Patient Support in US Healthcare System

The University of Chicago's Professor David Meltzer presents IGHI's fourth Annual Lecture.

The Institute of Global Health Innovation was delighted to welcome Professor David Meltzer to Imperial last week as speaker at their Annual Lecture 2015. 

Professor Meltzer, who is Professor of Medicine, Economics and Public Policy at the University of Chicago, joins previous speakers including Editor of the Lancet - Richard Horton, international champion of patient safety and public health - Sir Liam Donaldson, Dean of the School of Public Health at Harvard - Dr Julio Frenk and inventor, entrepreneur, CEO and venture capitalist - Dr Noubar Afeyan. 

During the talk, Professor Meltzer drew on his experience in medicine, innovation and health reform to talk about ‘Reforming high risk patient support in the U.S. Healthcare System’.  He focused on the rationale and design of the Comprehensive Care Physician Model, a University of Chicago Medicine program that aims to improve continuity of patient care after a hospital stay and strengthen the bond between doctor and patient. The model seeks to achieve this through assigning comprehensive care physicians (CCPs) to provide both inpatient and outpatient care to patients at high risk of hospitalisation, thereby ensuring better care provision at a lower cost.

Meltzer’s research explores problems in health economics and public policy with a focus on the theoretical foundations of medical cost-effectiveness analysis and the cost and quality of hospital care.

Innovative programmes like the Comprehensive Care Physician model aim to not only improve outcomes but also tackle the excess costs due to poor care coordination.  In the US alone, it is estimated that poor care coordination results in $25-$45 billion of wasteful spending annually on avoidable readmissions and complications.

Professor Meltzer said: “It was a pleasure to host the fourth of IGHI’s annual lectures.  The Comprehensive Care Physician idea brings together the insights of modern health economics and health outcomes research with among the oldest ideas in all of medicine. Patients take great value from being able to see their own doctor in the hospital.  It makes sense because when we are sick, we all need someone we can trust and who knows us as a person.”

Director of IGHI Professor The Lord Ara Darzi said: “We were delighted to welcome Professor Meltzer to Imperial and I would like to thank him for such an inspiring and engaging talk.  Poor care coordination contributes to poor-quality care outcomes and costs nations billions of dollars every year through inadequate management of care transitions, unnecessary hospital readmissions, and poor communication.  We were very interested to hear about new and effective approaches for improving care coordination and continuity for patients within their systems.”

Photos of the lecture can be found here.

Watch the full video recording below: