Don Berwick, M.D.
Modern Healthcare and American College of Healthcare Executives Health Care Hall of Fame 2022
Don Berwick is the United States' leading advocate for high-quality healthcare, and one of the top thinkers in healthcare today. He sees tremendous unrealized potential in American medicine. Despite our outstanding knowledge base, expert practitioners, and world-class equipment, our healthcare system can do better in providing safe, high-quality care at reasonable costs. The perfect blend of content and inspiration, Dr. Berwick helps everyone pursue better, more affordable care. In his talks, he addresses the sources of excellence and of defect in health care settings today, explains which approaches are not effective, and provides real insight on where improvement can be attained.
Don can also speak to the many new forces that are impacting healthcare. Disruptive changes—such as telehealth, new workforce roles, thoroughly empowered patients, artificial intelligence, machine learning, new sites of care, and mindfulness practice—are straining legacy models of care to the breaking point. Dr. Berwick shares how smart health care systems will need to adjust to survive. He also explores how addressing social determinants of health, long discussed but infrequently done, may now be arriving at last as a new way to invest. He explains the threats and opportunities that this trend will bring to traditional health care settings. And he explores the changing roles and duties of health care executives and (especially) Boards under the evolving demands of our times. He has worked on health care improvement with health care systems and Ministries of Health in well over three dozen nations in five continents, and as and advisor to the World Bank, WHO, and the InterAmerican Development Bank.
From July 2010, to December 2011, Dr. Berwick served as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. For 22 years prior to that, he was the founding CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a nonprofit dedicated to improving healthcare around the world. A pediatrician by background, he has also served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Berwick is on the Board of Advisors for NIHCM and serves on the boards of NRC Health and Boston Medical Center Hospitals. In 2013 and 2014, he was a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for Governor of Massachusetts.
Dr. Berwick is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine, where he has, among other duties, chaired or co-chaired the Board on Health Care Services, the NAM Forum on Traumatic Brain Injury, and numerous other NAM programs.
In 2005, he was appointed Honourary Knight Commander of the British Empire by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, the highest award in the United Kingdom for non-British subjects, in recognition of his work with the British National Health Service. He is the recipient of many other awards, including the Ernest A. Codman Award, the American Hospital Association's Award of Honor, the Heinz award for Public Policy, and the Institute of Medicine's Gustav O. Lienhard Award. He has been named as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London), a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practice, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. His over 200 articles have appeared in professional journals on such topics as healthcare policy and healthcare quality management. His books include Promising Healthcare: How We Can Rescue Health Care by Improving It, Curing Health Care, and New Rules: Regulation, Markets and the Quality of American Health Care. In 2023, Dr. Berwick launched Turn on the Lights, a podcast aimed at the general public and featuring candid conversations with healthcare workers, patients, innovators, activists, and researchers that explore how the American healthcare system is working and not working.
A powerful motivator, Don encourages institutions and individuals to do their work better, and, through the lens of improvement science, how.
Topics
The Triple Aim: Radical Redesign for Far Better Results
This lecture explores the background and evidence behind the need for the “Triple Aim” in health care: better care for individuals, better health for populations, and lower per capita costs. It explains why those results are way out of reach for health care as currently designed and operated, and what are the dire consequences of failing to change. It develops the needed principles for redesign, and presents example of success from around the world for each of those principles.
Seeking Era Three: Finding Our Balance in Troubled Times
Levels of burnout among physicians and nurses may be at an all-time high in the US and in many other nations. This lecture explores the reasons for burnout and conflict in the health care system. It traces the roots to two co-existing and unsatisfactory foundational cultures: the culture of professional dominance (“Era One”) and the culture of measurement and accountability (“Era Two”). It explains the deep flaws in both those world views, and recommends a new and more effective approach to the “Triple Aim” (better care for individuals, better health for populations, and lower per capita costs) – “Era Three.” It describes detailed components of Era Three, and implications for the behaviors, training, and self-image of physicians, nurses, other health professionals, leaders, and patients and families.
Changing the Balance of Power: “You Cannot Give What You Do Not Have”
This talk explores the need for major redesign of health care delivery – long overdue. Drawing on the so-called “Radical Redesign Principles” for a new health care system from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Leadership Alliance, Dr. Berwick will explain especially the first of those principles: “Change the Balance of Power,” with specific illustrations of how patients, families, and communities can take over their own care and better pursue their own health. This gives new and fresher meaning to the much-used phrase, “patient-centered care,” and offers doctors, nurses, and other health professionals a new and positive image of themselves as healers, “co-producing care” with those they serve. It also offers a glimpse of some of the truly disruptive care delivery system innovations now well on their way.
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