I think that we should get serious about solving world hunger. I’m pretty sure that you would agree that this would be a very worth endeavor. If we were to convene a meeting with some of the best and brightest in the World to and ask them to solve world hunger, they most likely would not be able to do so. It is just too big! If we parsed the plan to eliminate hunger in Georgia, it would be conceptually possible, but still to large. If we sat down with some people in a room and decided to work on processes that would eliminate hunger for senior citizens in Troup County, I would bet that a process could be put into place.

In a prior life, I was a consultant for a company specializing in quality improvement. This wasn’t one of those consulting gigs where you asked to borrow the clients watch to tell them what time it was. Rather, it was a consulting effort to focus business clients on how to improve business processes. I’ve probably forgotten much of it, but some things have always stuck with me. The first thing I remember is that if you can’t come up with a simple description of the process to improve, you might be looking a slice of life, not a process. The second is that it is generally pretty important to know who the customers of the process are and what their needs are.

This is simple, “first-blush”, but it doesn’t look much to me that there is a bunch of thought on these two topics in Washington in regards to health care reform.

As a consultant, I was often asked to sit in on quality improvement teams. Generally, you could listen and hopefully make some simple recommendations to help a team along. The biggest failing that I saw is people did a poor job of zeroing in on a process that you could get your arms around and improve. All too often, they were working on solving world hunger! Some times, you have to clarify and establish boundaries for process improvement to work.

Why can’t the whole health care reform efforts be parsed up? There is nothing saying that it has to one huge bill that it is so complex that no one understands it. If the President of the United States wanted buy in, he could help introduce small changes that have a chance of being agreed upon and implemented. In most of the communications that I’ve heard, a piece of the change seems to involve Medicare and Medicaid. Why not isolate one of those first. If bills were introduced outlining process improvements to eliminate fraud and overpayment in Medicare, who could comfortably vote against it?

What if bills were introduced to assist health care providers in integrating information throughout their systems? One of the health care clients I worked with in my consulting days was working on electronic prescribing - a system they felt would lessen medical errors by 80 percent. Who would vote against targeted technology improvements that would lower cost and provide higher quality of healthcare? Money spent on helping the providers improve their information systems would also provide jobs.

I would be glad to pull out some of my old books and go to Washington and help. They don’t really need me though. In football terms, I’m talking about blocking and tackling. Maybe these ideas are way too simple to ever fly in Washington.