A Consumer-driven system is the best solution for US healthcare reform - that was the thrust of Harvard's Regina Herzlinger’s provocative remarks at the Philips-sponsored Harvard Business Review event in Chicago. On September 14, 125 people gathered at the Art Institute of Chicago for the roundtable discussion entitled, "The Future of Healthcare: The Landscape Transformed."

The Harvard Business School professor and author of the influential book, Who Killed Healthcare: America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem and the Consumer-Driven Cure, kicked off the event with a keynote address.

During her talk, she discussed her concerns with a government insurance option and proposed a consumer-driven plan as the best solution for U.S. healthcare reform. She offered the Swiss healthcare system, which mandates citizens to buy their own healthcare plans from a choice of 84 competitive insurers, as an example. She praised the high quality, low cost, and broad access of the Swiss healthcare system, as the country that offers the highest equality of access to healthcare amongst the rich and the poor worldwide. She concluded with how she sees U.S. government involvement changing in a consumer-driven system, "The government right now sets prices, very badly. They set the coverage - he's covered, she's not. They set the benefits… and even increasingly tell doctors and hospitals how to deliver healthcare. In a consumer-driven system, the role of healthcare will be to provide the tax relief, to enable transparency, to enable the poor to participate, to guard against fraud and abuse, to prosecute vigorously against anti-trust and to get out of the way."

Following the keynote address, Dr. Eric Silfen, Chief Medical Officer of Philips Healthcare, Dr. Jay Anderson, Vice President of Quality and Operations at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Louise Liang, Senior Adviser at Kaiser Permanente, joined Herzlinger in a roundtable discussion. Representing the continuum of the healthcare debate, they articulated what innovations and policy shifts they believe are necessary moving forward.

Dr. Eric Silfen stressed integration of technology with physician practice and healthcare system culture, "The most important factor for driving innovation is cultural acceptance. We can provide expert systems, and we are trying to provide better systems that can enable coordination and care across a continuum, and that can drive out costs and increase efficiency. But we cannot be the best we can be unless there are others - those who are practicing medicine - joining us. We can come up with the fanciest code, the most novel technology, but, as [healthcare futurist] Jeff Goldsmith has stated, 'It really is culture that eats strategy for lunch every day'."

What else was said? Read the transcripts on GetInsideHealth.

What do you think? Is consumer-driven healthcare the answer to America's healthcare woes?

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