Provided

Dee Edington discusses wellness in the workplace at the Dec. 11-12 health care conference held by the Worker Institute at the ILR School in Manhattan.

More than 90 physicians, nurses, administrators, union officials and others attended an ILR School health care conference Dec. 11-12 that focused on improving health care delivery.

The conference was designed to increase collaboration among front-line staff and union and management leaders to deliver better patient care.

"We need radical changes in how our delivery system works," said Peter Lazes, director of the Healthcare Transformation Project, a program based at the Worker Institute at Cornell in Manhattan. Cornell is committed to providing health care union and management leaders with access to the next-generation methods they need to redesign health care delivery systems, he added.

Delivery systems must be redesigned so that care is coordinated, thereby preventing duplication of services and helping patients avoid unneeded hospitalizations, Lazes said. "We also need to control and reduce health care costs by redesigning our health care systems, not by reducing reimbursements to hospitals and health care centers. Redesigning our broken delivery system is the only way we will be able to drastically reduce health care costs. And front-line staff and unions need to work with management to make this happen. Labor and management both need to be part of this process."

The ILR School is working to help unions and management change to improve patient care and reduce costs.

"The health care world is changing dramatically. We want to help frame a conversation and help health care leaders have a safe space to examine and then respond to the changes," Lazes said.

April Smith, director of organizational development for the Service Employees International Union, said: "It's exciting to see health care teams working together. It gives us hope for the idea of teamwork."

Union-management teams from Kaiser Permanente, Montefiore and Maimonides Medical Centers, and other groups attended the conference, which also drew participants from medical centers where unions and management have not started to work together.

Presentations and workshops covered topics including methods to transform outpatient clinics and health centers to become primary care medical homes. Other sessions covered how to change the reimbursement system from fee-for-service to one that supports an increased focus on primary care and the integration of services, making sure that behavioral health services are available in primary care settings and particularly for patients with chronic care problems. And there were presentations on methods to accelerate the ability to create radical changes in our delivery system; improving the wellness of employees; strategies for labor and management to work together; and methods to engage patients in their care and provide them with critical information so they can make choices based on best practices, not just on whom their provider is.