Rocket Science in Health Care is "Delivery"

Bill Moyers, on his PBS television show, interviewed Dr. Jim Yong Kim, a physician and anthropologist, who is the new president of Dartmouth. A global health leader, Dr. Kim is co-founder of the humanitarian group, Partners in Health, and earlier in his career was a senior official with the World Health Organization, and the chair of three different departments at Harvard University. Asked what's wrong with our health care system, Dr. Kim responded, in part, "My own particular take on it is that I think for many, many years, we've been working under the fantasy that if we come up with new drugs and new treatments, we're done. The rest of the system will take care of itself. In my view, the rocket science in health and health care is how we deliver it. And unfortunately, there's not a single medical school that I know of that actually teaches the delivery of health care as one of the essential sciences...So my own view of it is that we have to rethink fundamentally the kind of research we do and the kind of people we educate, so that they'll think about the complexity of delivery as a topic that we can take on and study and learn about as a science."  more . . .


http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09112009/transcript2.html