Reece - The Health Reform Maze: A Blueprint for Physician Practices

Richard L. Reece, MD, pathologist, writer, and editor, is former Editor in Chief of Minnesota Medicine and Physician Practice Options . He has written 10 books on the healthcare system, including Voices of Health Reform: Interviews with Health Care Stakeholders at Work; Innovation-Driven Health Care: 34 Key Concepts for Transformation ; and, more recently, Obama, Doctors, and Health Reform . In the last, he explores what physician mindsets, patient concerns, U.S. culture, and our healthcare systems complexities portend for health reform.

Dr. Reece works with The Physicians Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization that represents physicians in state medical societies. The Physicians Foundation is made up of executive directors of state medical societies and seeks to advance the work of practicing physicians and to improve the quality of healthcare for all Americans. The opinions expressed here are his own and not those of the Foundation.

For four years, he has written a blog, Medinnovationblog.blogspot.com, which has over 1700 entries on healthcare innovation and reform. He is also on Twitter and Facebook. His Web site, www.doctorreece.com, is intended give insight into doctors reactions to health reform and into innovations that may transform the healthcare system. In the upper right corner, you can click and read his latest Medinnovation blog. In the lower right corner, you can read his Tweet of the day. Look for new features such as videos and images in the coming months.

Surveys indicate 90% of physicians believe they have been excluded from the health reform process. This concerns Dr. Reece, for it is physicians who must deliver the care promised by reforms. Any reforms will necessarily involve the government to some extent, but the resulting reforms should be more commonsensical and less massive than the present proposed reforms. He believes reform should be incremental. It should focus on less costly, more convenient, more effective, less disruptive, and more market-oriented solutions building on the merits of the present system while minimizing its faults. Dr. Reece stresses that physicians and patients must work together more closely to build a more personal, patient-centered system without massive interventions by third parties.

Meanwhile, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the law of the land. Physicians must deliver the care dictated under its mandates. They must accept government reimbursements 30% below pay offered by private plans, and they must sustain their practices based on lower margins. And they must find ways to cope with the influx of 32 million to 50 million more government-subsidized patients.

Dr. Reece was educated at Duke University and Duke University School of Medicine. He did his postgraduate training at Hartford Hospital and attended an 8-week course on health system management at Harvard Business School. He resides in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, with his wife, Loretta, a graduate of the Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing. He has two sons, Spencer, a nationally known poet and an aspiring Episcopalian priest, and Carter, who works at Brooks Brothers in New York City. Dr. Reece can be reached at rreece1500@aol.com or through his Web site at www.doctorreece.com, or at his Medinnovation blog.