President Obama may have chosen the Cleveland Clinic as his bully pulpit for health care today but it is the Mayo Clinic that started what is now looked to as the future of health care.
Mayo's mission from the hearts and minds of the Mayo brothers was and is simple; the needs of the patient come first.
"Most doctors want to do what is right but the system gets in the way, here at Mayo the system was designed so it doesn't get in the way of doing the right thing," Mayo Clinic orthopedic surgeon Dr. Peter Amadio said.
At Mayo, the records have always, since the 1930's, been shared.
In modern terms it's the "electronic medical records" President Obama has talked about wanting since his run for the oval office began.
The beauty of these records, already in place at mayo, is that not one drug, or test, gets repeated.
Nothing is wasted because all of the patient's information, from back pain to quadruple bypass, is right there.
"I really do think they understand the big picture; the question is what will get thru congress," Dr. Amadio said of the plan Obama talked about Wednesday night.
Dr. Amadio doesn't lay blame with the broken system on any one thing, not health insurance companies, not Medicaid or Medicare, and not for a lack of government's trying to help.
It's the price of care.
Simply, a hospital or a doctor gets reimbursed for the care ordered so more care is more money.
"The volume of activity, those are things that have driven the overall cost of the American medical system.
That is fueled by the primary care doctor getting 10 minute appointments, with 35 people, all day long.
The doctor cannot explore the art of medicine, they can only be forced to order up the drugs, the tests, and send you on your way.
Dr. Armadio says fix that.
Stop the incentive of ordering tests and tests and more tests, and make the incentive patient care, plain and simple.
"If we got rid of that stuff, we save a third of all that we spend and that is 2.5 trillion dollars on health care. A third of that and that is 700 billion dollars a year. That covers a lot of uninsured people."
(Copyright 2009 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)
