In a keynote session, Marty Makary, MD, MPH, surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins Medicine, in Baltimore, Maryland, told the audience [of the 2022 American College of Mohs Surgery Annual Meeting that innovation] will mean a systemwide change in how health care will be delivered.
“’Holistic care’ doesn’t capture it, ‘precision medicine’ doesn’t capture it,” Makary said, noting these phrases are not enough to describe some of the changes that are being talked about in medical schools and by the physicians joining the profession. “They are asking ‘should we be treating more patients with diabetes with cooking classes as opposed to medicine,’ ‘should we be talking about school lunch programs as much as we talk about bariatric surgery,’’ should we be treating more high blood pressure patients with stress management instead of throwing antihypertensives at them’?”
These solutions are needed, he said, because our current health care system is in crisis. He boiled the current health care crisis down to 2 central drivers, specifically appropriateness of care and pricing failures that are creating an open door for a “middle-man industry,” that is setting prices and making it difficult to deliver quality care at a price that is manageable for most patients.