T.E.D. General Stanley McChrystal

You should wonder what is General McChrystal doing on the Health Train? Hopefully by the time you have disembarked I will have conveyed to you the analogy of his leadership in the military and health care. He spoke at T.E.D. In Long Beach CA in 2011.

General McChrystal, of course is the former commander of U.S. And International forces in Afghanistan. A four-star general, he is credited for creating a revolution in warfare that fuses intelligence and operations. The analogies of changes in warfare and healthcare are immediately apparent.

The environment has changed. Health care is dispersed...using chat, video phone calls, complex communications, and may not be face-face.

1. Leadership

2. Technologies

3. Inversion of expertise, many changes at lower levels (digital)...Leadership experience.

4. Increasing reliance on electronic media places barriers for leadership, hands on.

5. Generational differences, shared purposes with different expertise, experience, vocabulary.

6. Ranger commitments to each other....Physician commitments to patients.

7. Addressing the possibility of failure, in a goal but not as a professional.

Does this sound familiar?

1. Challenges to leadership altered and magnified by generational changes.

2. Explosive and disruptive technology changes in diagnosis, delivery of care, and in technology, media and data storage, as well as process.

3. Challenges of senior health care givers and professionals obtaining expertise in #4. Inversion of electronic and media knowledge in juxtaposition to clinical expertise by senior physicians.

5. Generational differences in education and training processes, with a requirement of shared purpose in patient care and wellness.

6. Physician-patient commitments and physician-physician-hospital institution commitment and or patient care. (will this be the ACO?)

7. The possibility of failure? ACCA, ACOs. A non-system failure has already ocurred, it was not a goal, but the lack of a clearly defined endpoint.

8. Are we prepared for another failure? Was medicare a failure? Success or failure can only  be  determined in the context of time and setting. Medicare was designed in the early 1960s when there were fewer seniors eligible, and there were fewer diagnostic and therapeutic interventions as choices. continued…………..

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