Our Director of Clinical Services, Kathy Mion, and I had the pleasure of attending HANYS’ 50^th Annual Membership Conference in Saratoga Springs on June 28^th and 29^th.  The conference featured a diverse array of accomplished and insightful speakers who spoke with conviction and passion about the challenges facing our healthcare system, from suboptimal reimbursement rates, to cyber-attacks, to seemingly never-ending mergers and consolidations. 

Highlights included Dr. Elizabeth Rosenthal’s keynote address on how the health care system had been transformed over the past 25 years by economic forces in ways that benefit neither patients nor providers.  Dr. Rosenthal spoke poignantly about how wide price disparities and a lack of price transparency adversely impact both patients and employers and how the sense of mission so critical to the practice of medicine was being lost to business concerns and billing.  Dr. Rosenthal emphasized the need to rationalize pricing, increase price transparency, and focus more on the delivery of care than on the construction of impressive physical facilities.  Dr. Rosenthal also noted some recent positive trends, including the enactment of laws to protect patients against surprise medical bills modeled after New York State’s Emergency Medical Services and Surprise Bills Law.    

Friday’s panel discussion on strategies for leadership during disaster was both timely and informative.  Steve Thornton, a disaster recovery coordinator with Broward Health and the parent of a Marjorie Stoneman Douglas student, spoke passionately about the importance of emergency preparedness and walked the audience through the challenges one faces in an emergency situation.  He also spoke about the vital role hospitals play in responding to active shootings and other disasters. 

The panel discussion on “Merger Mania” gave three disparate views on hospital mergers, consolidations and partnerships, exploring mergers from the standpoint of a large hospital system, a hospital that had recently merged into another system, and a hospital that elected to remain independent.  For some hospitals, a merger with a larger institution can help improve the delivery of value-based care and provide a greater breadth of service to the patients they serve.  For others, remaining independent provides the best means of focusing on the delivery of quality care in their communities.  Whether to merge or consolidate depends on a plethora of factors which will vary from institution to institution and may change over time.  Each panelist presented cogent arguments as to why the decision to merge or remain independent promoted their organization’s mission.  All of the panelists agreed on the importance of assuring access to care in the communities they serve and on the need to address the wide disparities in reimbursement among payers (Medicaid, Medicare and private insurers). 

Finally, Steve Schmidt gave a spellbinding and provocative presentation on the current state of electoral politics in America, warning that “our future is not guaranteed because of the resilience of our past” and imploring the audience to approach the policy challenges of our time with common sense, compassion, decency and a willingness to listen to others’ points of view.  Indeed, this willingness to listen to everyone, including those with whom we disagree, represented a unifying theme for the entire conference. 

In a time of unprecedented change and complex, multifaceted challenges, there are no simple solutions.  Crafting solutions to the challenges of our time requires that we listen carefully to one another -- our patients, employees, colleagues and neighbors -- learn from each other’s experiences, and collaborate on solutions.