CDC has a 'rocket' ambition: health
That feat was accomplished in eight years and 59 days. In that amount of time, CDC believes America could become "the healthiest nation" in the world.
The time is ripe because there's "enough common pain around health and health-care costs" to bring out some dynamic and potentially successful collaborations, according to Dr. Bradley A. Perkins, chief strategy and innovation officer for the CDC, a microbiologist and medical doctor who in 2001 led the CDC's investigation into anthrax cases in Florida.
The transition to new national leadership is also a time of "real opportunity," he said.
He explained the challenge Tuesday during the inaugural CDC-Utah Department of Health Forum at the Capitol. At the invitation of Dr. David N. Sundwall, UDOH director, several high-level CDC officials came to Utah for discussions on public health. Dr. Edwin Trevathan, director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, a neurologist, afterward met with residents and faculty at Primary Children's Medical Center, while Alan Kotch, who oversees the CDC Procurement and Grants Office, met with Utah health directors and financial managers. Mid-day, Perkins discussed curbing health-care costs during an Intermountain Healthcare-sponsored "Healthy Dialogues" gathering.
"Where is health in the dialog about health care? Because it's health that's going to drive costs down," Perkins said.
Another challenge is the fact that public health budgets are going down, while everything else to do with health is going up, he said.
Key to change is real transparency, including information on outcomes and costs, seeing that the best results are rewarded and ensuring information-technology systems that work together, he said.
The goal of becoming the healthiest nation is reachable, Perkins said. To get there, health disparities need to be dealt with and access to care has to improve.
"We need to engage more people in creating health," he said. "The answer is not piling more and more responsibility on the practicing physician. ... Employers, families, elected leaders, individuals — they all have responsibility for health."
One challenge, he said, is that while there was no dearth of people in the 1960s vying to be astronauts and thus national heroes, it's a little harder to attract national public health heroes.
And he warned that the components of the current health reform debate — cost, quality and access — are "important, but inadequate." Limiting it to that is "akin to arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."
Effort right now is focused on getting the presidential candidates to sign on to the concept. After the election is when the real work begins, he said, adding "the real opportunity is in the transition period."
E-mail: lois@desnews.com
Recent comments
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