New technologies, pharmaceuticals, and methods of treatment will over the coming decade short-circuit much of today’s medical care, replacing it with cheaper, easier, more precise, more effective techniques that will produce startling changes in health care.

For the first time, we have the potential to use real data to drive the effectiveness of health care. But large practical obstacles bar the way. We can’t get there from here without specific action and real leadership from across the industry.

We now actually have considerable experience, data, examples, and outcomes of pilots that show exactly how to provide better health care, for less, for everyone. They have a number of factors in common, such as much more emphasis on primary care, prevention, and chronic care; teamwork; tight control of processes; and partnering with patients. All of these clearly illuminate making far better use of nurses - at the very moment that we are losing nurses out of direct patient care every day. Nurses are key to a better future. Let's take a look at how that works.

More than half of our current physicians intend to retire or cut back their practices at the very time that 30 to 40 million new people are entering the system, and the Baby Boom is entering its years of “peak medicine.” The necessity of producing more doctors, and emphasizing primary care, is obvious, but the real answer is far larger. Helping doctors become more efficient and effective could in effect greatly increase the number of available doctors and the time they have to give to patients, and restructuring and re-thinking how we do much of health care (particularly chronic care) could make the whole process far more effective and efficient -- and far less expensive.

The emerging future of health care shows definite and startling features: Far beyond merely “bending the cost curve” of health care inflation, various organizations across the country are showing how to actually drive the cost down by substantial amounts, without depriving anyone of anything. What is emerging from the private sector is a coherent collaborative strategy. Flower shows how it works and how to make it work, with clear examples, models, and parameters.

The trends, vectors, and forces that are rapidly re-shaping health care are far deeper and broader than what is written into the health care reform act. Within a decade the structure, economics, legal position, and technological underpinnings of health care will be nearly unrecognizable. The organizations that thrive in these changes will be the organizations that best understand, anticipate, and build for them.

Flower regularly brings his analysis of the future to specific industry sectors and stakeholders, such as:

• Hospitals, health care systems, and hospital associations
• Clinics and clinic associations
• Physician groups and other professional associations
• Behavioral health
• Long-term care and hospice
• Pharmacies
• Pharmaceutical companies
• Health care financial managers
• Health plans and managed care
• Major vendors
• Employers
• Investors

For each of these sectors, Flower unpacks the unfolding changes engulfing health care, and illustrates precisely how those trends and forces will re-shape the sector, re-define their part of the industry, will shift their goals, their finances, their strategies, and their effectiveness.