Throughout my last decade in healthcare as a senior executive at The Cleveland Clinic and Humana, I have been engaged in activities designed to improve the patient experience in consuming care. My work in healthcare began with the advent of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the United States (U.S.) and the design of a system of healthcare offerings for the new to healthcare consumer. Following this and with so many more consumers of care, I moved on to work on systems to make the administration of care simpler and easier for the patient. In both organizations we instituted significant transformative change initiatives designed to streamline and improve the patient experience while doing so more efficiently and cost effectively.
Yet, I knew there was so much more that we needed to do to 'fix' healthcare in the U.S. where 33% of every dollar spent is not spent on care but on administration. By 2040, unless things change, we will be spending 50% of every healthcare dollar on administration. As a result, I chose to leave the full-time practitioner world in order to research the conditions that continue to drive up the cost of healthcare in the U.S. with the intent to produce practical recommendations for change that can be implemented by healthcare administrators. My research is intended to understand what can we learn from those that do well from an administrative perspective and how they have taken what is arguably a complex system of care and simplified the processes of healthcare operations.
The Fowler Center's focus on Business as an Agent of World Benefit aligns well with my experience, my research interest and my current work in the healthcare sector. In addition to my DM research, I am engaged in philanthropies on both coasts that focus on aspects of the healthcare system undergoing transformation (caregiving and care collaboration) as models for change that can be implemented globally. I am also an investor in early stage start-ups led by global entrepreneurs seeking to disrupt the current models of healthcare operations - it is my premise that change in healthcare will be driven from the outside. Lastly, I am a collaborator with Start Up Health whose mission is to fundamentally transform healthcare via moonshots such as reducing the 'Cost [of care] to Zero.' My work in healthcare administration aligns with this moonshot.
The Mission of The Fowler Center to promote the business vision of 'doing well by doing good' could not be more applicable to healthcare across the globe and to the U.S. in particular. I believe that we can catalyze change in healthcare in the U.S. through public and private partnerships, through collaboration between care delivery systems and through the sharing of best practices across the industry. Moreover, I have a strong self-interest, as my wife is the leader of a philanthropy that delivers family and social services in our community and our daughter is a pediatric primary care nurse practitioner. So, you could say that fixing healthcare is an 'all in the family' affair!
You can find Mike on LinkedIn at: linkedin.com/in/mbellissimo