Joe Flower

Joe Flower is the founder and CEO of the education company Imagine What If, Inc. He has been writing, speaking, and consulting about change and the future, especially in healthcare, for over 25 years. He is the author or co-author of a number of books, including books on the aging of America, on Disney, and on the futures of China and Japan. He is a regular columnist for Hospitals and Health Networks, and for the journal of the American College of Physician Executives. His clients have included the Department of Defense, the World Health Organization, AirBus, the UK National Health Service, and the Global Business Network.

Keynote Topics

How We Can Drive Down Real Costs in Health Care
The emerging future of health care shows definite and startling features: Far beyond merely "bending the cost curve" of health care inflation, various organizations across the country are showing how to actually drive the cost down by substantial amounts, without depriving anyone of anything. What is emerging from the private sector is a coherent collaborative strategy. Flower shows how it works and how to make it work, with clear examples, models, and parameters.

Where We're Really Headed: Health Care 2020 and Beyond
The trends, vectors, and forces that are rapidly re-shaping health care are far deeper and broader than what is written into the health care reform act. Within a decade the structure, economics, legal position, and technological underpinnings of health care will be nearly unrecognizable. The organizations that thrive in these changes will be the organizations that best understand, anticipate, and build for them.

Facing The Physician Crisis
More than half of our current physicians intend to retire or cut back their practices at the very time that 30 to 40 million new people are entering the system, and the Baby Boom is entering its years of "peak medicine." The necessity of producing more doctors, and emphasizing primary care, is obvious, but the real answer is far larger. Helping doctors become more efficient and effective could in effect greatly increase the number of available doctors and the time they have to give to patients, and restructuring and re-thinking how we do much of health care (particularly chronic care) could make the whole process far more effective and efficient -- and far less expensive.

Nurses: A Key To Better Faster Cheaper Health Care
We now actually have considerable experience, data, examples, and outcomes of pilots that show exactly how to provide better health care, for less, for everyone. They have a number of factors in common, such as much more emphasis on primary care, prevention, and chronic care; teamwork; tight control of processes; and partnering with patients. All of these clearly illuminate making far better use of nurses - at the very moment that we are losing nurses out of direct patient care every day. Nurses are key to a better future. Let's take a look at how that works.

The End of Health Care As We Know It: Techniques, Technologies, and Treatments
New technologies, pharmaceuticals, and methods of treatment will over the coming decade short-circuit much of today's medical care, replacing it with cheaper, easier, more precise, more effective techniques that will produce startling changes in health care.

Data-Driven Health Care: Better Faster Cheaper
For the first time, we have the potential to use real data to drive the effectiveness of health care. But large practical obstacles bar the way. We can't get there from here without specific action and real leadership from across the industry.

The Next Health Care: Talks For Specific Industry Sectors
Flower regularly brings his analysis of the future to specific industry sectors and stakeholders, such as:

• Hospitals, health care systems, and hospital associations
• Clinics and clinic associations
• Physician groups and other professional associations
• Behavioral health
• Long-term care and hospice
• Pharmacies
• Pharmaceutical companies
• Health care financial managers
• Health plans and managed care
• Major vendors
• Employers
• Investors

For each of these sectors, Flower unpacks the unfolding changes engulfing health care, and illustrates precisely how those trends and forces will re-shape the sector, re-define their part of the industry, will shift their goals, their finances, their strategies, and their effectiveness.

Articles

H&HN Daily Columns by Joe Flower:

• Better Health Care at Half the Cost
  By Joe Flower - March 27, 2012
  Inevitably, the financial risk for health outcomes will shift from payers to providers and users.
  
  
• Better Ways of Thinking about the Future
  By Joe Flower - January 24, 2012
  2012 and 2013 present a unique and compelling opportunity for health care executives to produce significant change.
  
  
• The X Questions: Strategy for the Next Health Care
  By Joe Flower - November 22, 2011
  The key strategy considerations every hospital should be focusing on have changed dramatically in just the past year.
  
  
• The Power in What We Most Fear
  By Joe Flower - September 20, 2011
  The health care industry finds itself in the midst of instability. Ironically, this instability gives us the opportunity to make meaningful changes.
  
  
• The Illusory Bottom Line
  By Joe Flower - July 21, 2011
  Despite tremendous pressure on hospitals to control costs, slashing spending often hurts the bottom line in the long term.