Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D.

I am wildly optimistic about AI in health care. We are at the steep upward curve. AI will help in 3 distinct ways:

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1) With back office functions like billing or being AI scribes for physician office visits,

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2) Decision-supports—assisting radiologists or averting side effective from polypharmacy—I work with a company in this area.

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3) Providing remove patient treatment plans and interventions—IThis is the cutting edge and key. There is evidence AI therapists are as good as MDs, and I work with a company that does this for children with OT/PT, mental health, self-regulation, autism, and normal development.

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AI will help in focal areas. But AI cannot fix the health care system’s problems—the problem of lack of universal coverage, reasonable costs, uniformly high quality care, equity, and greater satisfaction of patients and clinicians. These problems result from 3 structural defects built into the foundations of the health system such as fragmentation of coverage and payment. Until these problems are addressed the system will continue to deteriorate.

There is an enormous Wellness-Industrial Complex. There are three problems with these wellness and longevity authors, newsletters, internet gurus and Tik Tok influencers. While some of whom have a great insights, many are making crazy, unsubstantiated recommendations. Many wellness commentators have enormous conflicts of interest. Finally there is just too much information so for the average person who wants to be healthy it is hard to differentiate fact from fiction and make suitable adjustments in life.

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Wellness is not really complex. It entails 6 simple things, and you don’t have to do them perfectly to get the enormous benefits. The most important thing is cultivating social relations. They add to your wellness, happiness and longevity. Second is staying mentally engaged and thus not retiring to ward off cognitive impairment and dementia. Third, eat well. This mainly entails stopping to do bad stuff—stopping to drink sodas, stopping to eat snacks like cookies, potato chips, and packaged sweets, and reducing ultra-processed foods to about 20% or less of calories. The main good thing to do is eat fermented foods—yogurt, kimchi, miso, and other products with probiotics. Fourth, get the 3 types of exercise—aerobic, strength training, and flexibility and balance. Fifth, sleep like a baby. You cannot will yourself to sleep, but you can make it conducive. Finally, don’t be a schmuck—don’t take unnecessary risks. This means don’t smoke or vape, don’t drink alcohol or no more than 4 drinks a week, don’t buy a gun to protect yourself, and certainly don’t try to climb Mt. Everest. These are all schmuck moves.

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Maybe the most important advice is not to obsess over wellness—don’t make it a religion or all consuming obsession. Adopt the key behaviors and put it into the background so you can focus on the important things in your life—your family, your career, making the world better.

Taking his controversial essay in The Atlantic, “Why I Hope to Die at 75," as a starting point, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel will explain why he wants to live to 75. He will question conventional wisdom about aging and dying and will push audience members to define for themselves what makes a life meaningful.

Dr. Emanuel shares practical, concrete steps that payers and providers, as well as businesses and government, can take in order to adapt to the major shifts happening within healthcare, and to transform the American healthcare system to provide consistently higher-quality and lower-cost care.

American healthcare is changing more rapidly now than it has in decades. What will our healthcare system look like 5,10 years from now? How will it impact your audience? In this talk, Dr. Emanuel will outline the nine megatrends he believes will characterize the changing landscape of American healthcare over the next decade: 1) merging of payers and providers—amplifying value-based payments 2) reducing upcoding and other gaming of medicare advantage 3) ever more automation 4) hospital closures and concentration 5) transformation of remote patient monitoring into remote patient management 6) expansion of comprehensive primary care 7) mental health parity 8) improved maternity and newborn care and 9) enhancing critical non-health care services. There are few people better positioned to project the future of American health care than Dr. Emanuel — and he will draw on his vast experience as a practicing physician, researcher, policymaker, as well as his discussions with thousands of leaders in the health sector to help audiences understand what’s coming next in the healthcare system.

In this presentation, Zeke describes the pressing need for health care reform, the key innovations in the Affordable Care Act, and how they are likely to impact the actual delivery of care. From improving efficiency with "inter-operable" electronic health records to restructuring care delivery to improve outcomes and lower cost, Dr. Emanuel will provide an insider's view of the vision driving health care reform, the challenges looming, and how the future of American medicine will impact you.

Physicians and hospitals are always being asked to transform their care, to embrace the triple aim and provide more patient-centric, high –quality care. But what does this mean? How can physician practices and hospital systems become higher-value providers? After studying approximately 20 successfully transformed, high-performing medical organizations, including both innovative medical organizations and new companies, Dr. Emanuel delineates 12 key practices necessary for transformation. and These practices range from changing how patients are scheduled, registered, and roomed, to incorporating behavioral health services, palliative care, community-based interventions, and lifestyle interventions with standard primary care. Through engaging case studies of patients and medical organizations, Dr. Emanuel illustrates how these transformational practices can be effectively implemented. Recognizing that no medical organization can implement 12 practices simultaneously, Dr. Emanuel separates the transformational practices into three tiers of differing priority. Using this model, Dr. Emanuel shows how, through the implementation of these 12 practices, a provider or practice can transform to deliver consistently high-quality, low-cost care. Dr. Emanuel also address on the growing field of virtual medicine. Taking a contrarian perspective, he argues that virtual medicine should not be a central component to a medical organizations’ transformational strategy. Remote monitoring, virtual visits, and other technologies are unlikely to be an effective way to improve quality and lower costs, especially for high-cost patients with chronic conditions. The applicability of the 12 transformational practices extends beyond use by only providers and health systems. Through case studies, Dr. Emanuel shows that these same practices may also be used by patients to find high-performing physicians and practices for their own personal care.

Clinician burnout is at an all-time high. A generally taxing career made even more difficult by a global pandemic, many healthcare workers are just barely holding on. Between 47%-60% of physicians and over 60% of nurses report burnout. This is bad news not only for worker mental health and productivity, but also for patients, as burnout is linked to increased medical errors and delays and decreased attention to patients. The situation is so dire that the Surgeon General has named health worker burnout a national priority. What can healthcare leaders do about it? Burnout isn’t an individual problem and thus treating the individual will never be an effective solution. The answer lies in meso-level interventions, or those initiated at an institutional level. In this talk, Dr. Zeke Emanuel outlines the four overlooked causes of clinician burnout and provides the data-backed solution each one. By restoring centrality of meaning in patient care, enhancing worker autonomy, reinforcing patient-clinician respect, and fostering collegiality, leaders can reverse this alarming trend and ensure your employees are always in a place to give their best.

Reports show that up to 77% of employees across all industries have experienced burnout at some point in their careers. For years, the onus has been on the worker to resolve this issue in the name of self-help books, meditation, and the like. More recently, employers have sought to assist with burnout by way of employee wellness initiatives like office happy hours and in-house yoga sessions. But the research shows little evidence of these measures of having an impact because the focus is ultimately still on the micro-level. Burnout isn’t an individual problem and thus treating the individual will never be an effective solution. To truly solve the burnout dilemma, organizations must think bigger. In this talk, Dr. Zeke Emanuel introduces the data-backed meso-level interventions—those initiated at an institutional level—that have proven to effectively reduce burnout in workers. By prioritizing meaningful work, enhancing worker autonomy, fostering collegiality in a way that doesn’t force social interactions, and promoting a culture of well-being, you can reverse this alarming trend and ensure your employees are always in a place to give their best.