The 2nd Annual Summit on the Future of Rural Health Care was held on Wednesday in Sioux Falls. The daylong event featured discussions on various topics related to rural health care.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel participated in the day’s opening discussion: Reinventing America’s health care workforce. He was asked about the biggest megatrends in reinventing America’s health care workforce. “Well, I think critical going forward is going to be an expansion of value-based payment,” he said. “It’s taken way too long to roll it out. And there will be an expansion of primary care and a bigger focus on primary care. We’ve totally denigrated primary care for a century now, and I think that’s gonna be built up.”
He noted mental health is another, saying “obviously the mental health crisis is critical. I think the realization of the interaction between the mental health and the physical health is transforming how we think about mental health problems. It also transforms the economic equation so you have a care-giving as well as an economic incentive to expand those.”
Dr. Emanuel said automation is another necessary megatrend for rural health care. “You can’t solve the workforce problem by throwing more people at it. Just look at the demographics, look at the unemployment rate, and you realize automation is the answer. Now when you mention automation, certainly five years ago, everyone is going crazy because they’re ‘steal my job’. Well the history of automation has not been stealing jobs, it turns out. It’s been changing what people do, but it’s not been stealing jobs. It’s making people more productive augmenting what we can do.”
Other topics discussed included reimagining the nursing workload, solving physician burnout, and a legislative outlook when it comes to health care workforce solutions.