Food (FAT FREE) for Thought!

As a part of reaching out to all employees and communicating the importance of what our health system, Cleveland Clinic, is doing, Our CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove visits a different regional hospital each month. He takes the chance to explain to employees, staff physicians, and administration what strategic moves we are making, how we are preparing for the future of healthcare, and what changes needed to be made in our system and in general.

I went and listened to him speak to employees at our Fairview Hospital on the west side of Cleveland. He took questions that ranged from the role of Health IT and integration, international expansion, employed vs private practice physicians, policy changes in healthcare, AND the future model of care delivery.

As a part of discussing the future model of care delivery Dr. Cosgrove talked about two changes that need to occur in order for healthcare reform to truly "sticky".

1. We need to drive efficiency by promoting a true healthcare "system" with complete integration.
2. We must reduce and control the healthcare/disease burden.

I would like to focus on the second change that has to occur. In recent years we have seen that our nation has become one of TOO MANY wants and desires. We want things NOW and in EXCESS. Well, these things have come back to bite us. Not only is debt and financial distress increasing, BUT our weight is also increasing. Clinically there is now a new classification of obesity. In bariatrics, the "Super Obese" are individuals with BMIs (Body Mass Index) between 80 and 100. To put this in perspective a normal person has a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9, an overweight person has a BMI between 25 and 29.9 and an obese individual has a BMI of over 30 (http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/). So, we are talking about 3 times the "obese" BMI. These individuals weigh in the 1,000 pound range. Obviously, the bad habits of eating too much, consuming the wrong diet, and living sedentary lives are catching up to us.

In essence, there is a huge cost that comes along with obesity and treating complications or co-morbidities that are derived from obesity, such as heart disease and diabetes. In fact, last week I was touring our Cardiovascular ORs and spoke with one of our well-known heart surgeons. He said that the amount of time and resources required to perform surgery on an obese patient is many times greater than that of our normal patient. The point is that obesity (and other lifestyle related conditions) is costing the overall healthcare system. These costs have been documented quite clearly in this article.

This article demonstrates that obesity costs the system $147 billion each year. As Dr. Cosgrove mentioned today, if we were to eliminate obesity from our nation (obviously a big goal, but dream with me here) we would be able to completely cover the over 45 million uninsured individuals through the saved costs....healthcare reform requires a "healthy change". That includes ridding the system of smoking......an issue that costs the system another $100 billion a year!!! When will we decide to live healthy lives? Time for me to stop eating my nightly dose of ice cream...self-control here I come!