We Have to Get the Upstream Things Right: Education, Prenatal Care, and Nutrition

A Conversation with Jane Sarasohn-Kahn

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, MA, MHSA
Twitter: @healthythinker

Jane is a health economist, communicator and trend weaver. Advising, writing and speaking, she focuses across the health/care ecosystem on consumers, health, technology, and policy. Her clients include stakeholders across the health/care ecosystem. You can read her insights at Health Populi, a blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

Episode Takeaways

1. Gil is joined by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, a health economist, advisor, and global educator. She supports clients across the healthcare ecosystem at the intersection of health, technology, and people. She blogs at HealthPopuli, and sits on several boards.
2. Economics is the study of scare resources, and when we look at the microeconomics of healthcare, resources are scarce even though we devote 20c on the dollar of each household to it. How do we spend smarter? We have to seek out value so we don’t waste resources in health – both monetary and human. We must leverage digital and technology in a more effective way and resource health and healthcare sustainably for the future.
3. The money isn’t all going to the delivery of healthcare to people – 30% goes to administrative waste due to duplication, paper-based systems, lack of digital and more. We need to do more to reduce waste in the system. A lot of the money goes basically nowhere.
4. Believe it or not, most babies in the United States are born to mothers on Medicaid. We have to get the upstream things right: education, prenatal care, and nutrition. We have drivers of health that travels in groups like this, but our spending is inverse to what it needs to be. You want to be in America if you get cancer, but that’s about the only thing we excel in as a country relative to others’ outcomes. We lack in primary care and the onramp to it.
5. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting better at moving data around and into open systems. We’re starting to capture data from the urgent care to the pharmacy to our Apple Watch and so on. We’re starting to see the green shoots of electronic health records being able to accept this data, play with it, and amplify it from within the record.

Gil Bashe

Managing Partner, Chair Global Health, FINN Partners
Twitter: @Gil_Bashe
LinkedIn: Gil Bashe

Gregg Masters

Founder & Managing Director, Health Innovation Media
Twitter: @GreggMastersMPH
LinkedIn: Gregg Masters, MPH

Join digital health advocate and author Gil Bashe, on Health Unabashed, as he discusses the power of collaboration and innovation in improving care across the health ecosystem. Sharing stories and insights from a global perspective, Gil looks at the companies and people who are making a difference and offers his opinions on how to connect the dots to transform the industry for good.

Tune in weekdays at 10:30 am, 6:30 pm, & 2:30 am ET.

Join the conversation on Twitter at #HealthUnaBASHEd