Jacquelyn Cawley, MD, vice president of Population Health & CMO for ambulatory care at BayCare, joined "Becker's Ambulatory Surgery Centers Podcast" to talk about how she works to address inequality in healthcare.
This is an excerpt. To download the full episode, click here.
This excerpt was edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Question: There's so many challenges with inequity in the U.S. healthcare system. How can we improve?
Dr. Jacquelyn Cawley: I've been thinking about this for a couple of decades now. Everything that I've been doing for the last 20 years or so has been an effort to transform the healthcare system wherever I could and to help to lead and organize physicians to follow suit.
I think that we, in healthcare, are best poised to help do that transformational work. It's not easy work, but I think we're the ones that are ready to do it. It's about being disruptive to ourselves — thinking big and not being afraid to disrupt some of the things that we've had in place for a really long time under our model of fee-for-service care. It's about not being afraid to disrupt that and moving away from a volume mentality to a value mentality.
We've really seen an acceleration of embracing virtual care and the other digital technologies that are out there. It's been one of the real positive things that have come out of the COVID-19 pandemic. It really does allow us to provide a much greater level of access to care for people and also allows us to engage and connect with them in different ways than we ever had before.
It's about not just thinking about the individual when they're ill, but really having a more holistic viewpoint of how to improve the health and wellness of the community through prevention and screenings and appropriate access to care. We have to think about it from a population standpoint versus just the individual in front of you.