Friday, April 22, 2016

Lown Institute/ Right Care Alliance 2016 Conference

I am back from the annual Lown Institute/ Right Care Alliance meeting in Chicago.  A considerable part of the meeting was devoted to issues that may be familiar to readers of Health Care Renewal.

Shannon Brownlee, in her keynote talk, "Introducing the Right Care Alliance," called our current US health care system "corrupt."  She noted how clinical research has been "hijacked," (see our posts on the suppression and manipulation of clinical research).  She noted how the multi-million dollar compensation of CEOs whose hospitals serve - not always well - primarily poor people (see our posts on executive compensation and mission-hostile management).  She called for a national conversation to "expose the dark matter" of medicine, and right the wrongs of a new "gilded age."

The Right Care Alliance has a Vision Statement which calls for health care in which

Healthcare is a right, not a commodified privilege, and access to healthcare is universal, equitable, and affordable. Everybody in, nobody out.

There is meaningful public transparency around costs and outcomes that matter to patients and communities.

The science and practice of medicine is free of commercial bias and the profit motive.

among other imperatives.

Not to toot our own horns too much, but Dr Adriane Fugh-Berman of PharmedOut.org and I led a workshop on deceptive pharmaceutical and device promotion in the context of health care corruption.

Hopefully, much of the conference content will eventually show up on the web, but so far one nice video summary has been produced:

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