Effective Presentation Skills: Health Care Presentations

I attended the World Health Care Congress in Washington and saw some remarkable presentations.  Here is a brief synopsis from my notes.

33% of health care costs in the USA are cardio-vascular; 20% cancer; 11% diabetes; and 10% obesity.

Does this mean that if we ate less and more wisely, we could eliminate up to 50% of the cost of health care in our country?

Does this mean we are a country that’s dying and going bankrupt because we eat too much?

Governor Bredesen of Tennessee said in his remarks that our health care system works the same way Safeway would work if, when we arrived at the store, a representative of Safeway escorted us around the aisles and put whatever he thought we might need in our cart.

Then, when we checked out, we would not be shown the bill.  Instead, it would be sent to a third party who was receiving a flat fee for providing us with food.

Is this what they call “a license to steal?”

They did a survey of the audience.  Over 80% of the health care professionals in attendance said that the American health care system is broken.  And these were people who work in it–whose livelihood depends on its survival.

Someone else said, “Why is it that as cell phones and computers get more technologically sophisticated, they get cheaper, while as medicine evolves in the same way it gets more expensive?”

We learned that measuring healthcare outcomes has unintended consequences.  Sometimes it’s hard to measure outcomes, so we measure processes instead and stop there.  Or we cherry-pick the patients we measure.  Or we otherwise figure out a way to game the system.

Furthermore, in some areas where outcomes have been measured and published, patients who review the data do not base their decisions on it.  Instead, they rely more on stories they’ve heard and on their relationships.

This is consistent with much of the work we do in the art and science of persuasion.  The power of statistics can be trumped by the power of a compelling story, and by the “ethical appeal“–classical rhetoric’s term for the power of the speaker’s character and relationship with the audience to make his argument more persuasive.

Finally, we learned that in order to effectively measure healthcare outcomes, we should:

1. Measure single conditions
2. Measure from the bottom up (allow departments to develop their own criteria.)
3. Use both intermediate and final outcomes when measuring.
4. Feedback the data to the people so they can continuously improve the measurement system.

This made me think that I should use these principles when helping clients improve the outcomes of their presentations.

Will do.