Dr. Paul Fabela, left, Tommy Taylor and Dr. Heidi Taylor.
The Fort Worth Business Press’s Business for Breakfast Series focused on issues surrounding health care at the Aug. 22 event.
Co-Presenting Sponsors for the event were Pinnacle Bank and JTaylor. The gold sponsor was Imagetek.
Here are some quotes from the panel:
Tommy Taylor, vice president, managing consultant, Higginbotham:
The reality is, there was a study done out of Florida. Over the last ten years, the actual cost of health care has gone up just over twelve percent. The commercial payers, the actual price they were paying, has gone up over a hundred percent. So there’s no relationship price to cost. So we’ve got to get more involved with the cost of health care, how we can utilize that number, instead of the price that we’re simply charged for health care.
Dr. Paul Fabela, chief physician officer, DPC Healthcare:
[O]our primary care system in this country is flawed. What I mean by that is traditional primary care is actually fee-for-service based, meaning, in order for a doctor to get reimbursed, a patient has to come in to be seen. Okay? But over the past few years, what we’ve seen is reimbursement rates have flattened and in some cases declined, but the cost of delivering care for patients have been increasing.
Dr. Heidi Taylor, dean of the school of health professions, Texas Wesleyan University:
Nurses are sort of unique in that we are educated around the multi-faceted elements of health. And that is, that it’s a mind, body, spirit, sort of experience. We learn that early on. We are often, however, employed in situations where it’s really all about taking care of the physical. It’s very difficult for us to be able to bring forward the rest of that theoretical and even research-based work that tells us that even that mind and spirit pair can be very important in a more rapid, more successful healing experience.
This story will be updated.
For information on future Business for Breakfast events:
www.fortworthbusiness.com/events/business_for_breakfast.html