Healthcare is the biggest topic ever, #1 on voter's minds, everyone has a plan. It's a failed system, how do we change it, make it cheaper, make it work for everyone? Read More >

The problem? Healthcare is not only insanely expensive, it's insanely complex—so it's easy to mask what makes it so expensive and what we can do about it. In any system, over-priced healthcare will be restricted, rationed, out of reach for many.

If we're going to change healthcare, we have to know how it really works. We certainly don't get deep insight or complex awareness from the media opinion spouters and policy posers on our screens, or in the candidates' various plans and pronouncements.

So let me explain. Seriously, this has been my entire career for 40 years: understanding the arcane, one-of-a-kind economics and politics of healthcare as a system, and conveying that knowledge in terms that anyone can understand.

In one session I will break down the complexities: the feedback loops, the hidden incentives, the political maneuverings, and the vast changes and opportunities coming. Your audience will get it in ways they never did before. Read Less ^

The political arena is a roar with multiple drastic plans to change healthcare dramatically—at the very moment that the vast system is both consolidating and deconstructing, facing new disruptive entrants, shifting from insured fee-for-service to alternatives, and being transformed by new technologies. Read More >

It's complicated and it's scary. What will happen to your organization and your career? What should we do now when we don't know what's happening? Five years out, is it smoking wreckage to the horizon?

We can do better at seeing our way forward. I'll break down the big trends happening now, then cross them with four political scenarios: three different possibilities of big reform, plus the less-discussed but definite path that the current administration is already taking in its attempts to bring the cost of healthcare down.

In one intense session of sober, realistic futurism, you will get a better sense of what healthcare might look like in five years, what your organization's role in it could be, and what paths you personally should be considering right now. Read Less ^

Something powerful is forming beyond the fog, haze, and chaos of 2018, an ecology of futures that grow from the interaction of new technologies, new pathways of care, and new economics. Flower calls these The Table of Elements of Healthcare. These deep disruptive trends will mix and re-combine to shape healthcare in ways that are more powerful and fundamental than today’s political shifts. Picture: Blockchain and artificial intelligence meet reference pricing, personal medicine and population health. And there are others, some you may be innovating with, others you may not have considered: the platforming of the business model, new patient-centered tech, DIY healthcare and the quantified self, mobile tech linked up into 24/7 distributed care, medical automation and Big Data analytics, population health management, and seamless coordination, among others. Read More >

What will it look like when these disruptive elements – the new systems and new tech – recombine and actually work? What will the Next Healthcare look like, day to day, for clinicians, healthcare leaders, patients, parents, employers? In this talk, you’ll take the imaginative journey and learn a framework for choosing the elements that will get you where you want to go. Read Less ^

We’re back in the cage fight. We’ve been struggling with healthcare reform and payment reform for 8 years now — and now they’re going to rip it all up and replace it with … something. The process is likely to be a lot more protracted and chaotic than anyone hopes for. And we won’t know how it really works out until well after the law is in place. We’re talking years. In the meantime, what was built under the Affordable Care Act, the sources of big chunks of our healthcare income, may or may not survive the disruption. Read More >

You must be asking:

• How do you and your organization economically and emotionally survive this period with a minimum of hair-tearing and -pulling?
• What are the best ways to secure your survivability until it all shakes out?
• Which aspects of our current reality are likely to change the least?

Here’s the kicker: The expectation of constrained resources, the chaos and uncertainty of getting to them, and the increased unwillingness of private payers to be cost-shifted into the cash cow role, will lead to a paradoxical result: much more rapid innovation in both business models and the technology that supports them as the industry reshapes to meet a radically different future. Hold onto your hats, folks.

In this talk, Joe Flower brings current events and trends to bear on your immediate situation, and offers a framework for navigating through it. He combines the art of the long view with up-to-the-moment insights into the unfolding political realities and their second- and third-order consequences. Read Less ^

We hear it in blog after news article after press release: This changes everything! Introducing the new technology will make healthcare so much more efficient that healthcare will become cheaper, more available, and better. All by itself! Read More >

Just as often, Joe Flower sees broad discussions of the future of healthcare that are all about the technology and ignore the economics of this vast system. Can the same old models be made to work by means of new, more efficient technology?

In this talk Flower explores the two main scenarios, Fee-for-service + tech v. business model innovation + tech. Can one or both accomplish the same goals of reducing costs, improving care, and making care affordable and accessible for all? Let’s think this through and come out with a clear, waking strategy. Read Less ^