In honor of Women’s History Month, Healthcare Finance News has asked some of the women leaders in the nation’s healthcare industry to talk about the role of women in healthcare. Contact HFN associate editor, Stephanie Bouchard, on Twitter @SBouchardHFN if you have suggestions for women that should be included in our series.
Today, we hear from Gail Wilensky, PhD, an economist and senior fellow at Project HOPE, an organization committed to long-term sustainable healthcare across the world. Among her many accomplishments, Wilensky served as the director of Medicare and Medicaid programs from 1990 to 1992 and as a senior health and welfare adviser to President George Herbert Walker Bush. She also chaired the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) from 1997 to 2001 and served two terms on the governing council of the Institute of Medicine. She is frequently sought out to act as an adviser to elected officials and others.
Q: What role do women have as decision-makers/leaders in today’s healthcare sector?
A: Starting with the most obvious, the secretary of Health and Human Services is a female. In terms of healthcare leadership at a federal policy level (she) is a very important decision maker, but if you look more broadly around, you see women occupying roles in many corporations, increasingly sitting on corporate board seats, active in government. (That’s) probably been less recent – the positions in government and in the corporate world – but still relatively recent. I think we’ve seen in the last decade or two decades a rapid rise in the public positioning of women as decision makers. Now, at that level, when it comes to healthcare, let me state the obvious: women have always been very important in healthcare decisions because they typically make or are in a major way responsible for the healthcare decision making of their families. That’s been true for decades. It’s nice that they have been able to go beyond only focusing their talents there – that's a very important area to have good decision making – but to extend it to both the public policy and the corporate area and the foundation world, etc.
Q: What do women bring to the table to shape the future of healthcare?
A: It’s an interesting question. Women come in all variety of experiences and backgrounds, political beliefs, corporate experience, but I think women can help bring an understanding of the need to have balances between the objectives you’re trying to achieve and that’s because women frequently are multi-taskers, particularly those who combine working outside the home with having a family, raising children, etc. That’s going to be very important trying to make sense of our healthcare system. We know we have been having unsustainable growth for several decades, although we’re in a reprieve right now in terms of unusually slow spending growth, and at the same time not having the kind of clinical outcomes and appropriateness in patient safety that we would like to see in our healthcare system. Being able to make trade offs and to try to achieve better balance in terms of the outcomes you do have is something I think women are particularly able to help bring to the table. But of course, looking to the men involved in healthcare and healthcare decision making to help make that happen as well.
Q: What do you personally believe should be the path forward to better care and lower costs?
A: We need to change and realign the incentives so we will reward the clinicians and the institutions who provide the kind of healthcare outcomes that we want to see occur – not necessarily doing more and more complex but doing those interventions that produce the best health outcomes for individuals and at the same time we need to get patients and consumers more actively involved in producing good health. It’s not enough to just focus on the provider community. So much of healthcare now is associated with lifestyle, illnesses, obesity, inadequate levels of exercise, inappropriate use of substances, etc. There isn’t a healthcare system so sophisticated that it can overcome some of the bad behavior we engage in, so we really need to get consumers more actively involved in their own health and in being more active decision makers in the healthcare that they receive. That’s going to be an important part of the solution for the future.