J.D. Kleinke

Biography

J.D. Kleinke is a medical economist, author, health care entrepreneur, and leading advocate for a smarter, data-driven, post-partisan health care system.

He has been instrumental in the creation of four health care information organizations, served as a health care business columnist for The Wall Street Journal, advised both sides of the political aisle on pragmatic approaches to health policy and legislation, and served on the boards of several public and privately held health care companies. He has also worked on strategic initiatives for numerous academic medical centers, hospital systems, and large physician groups, including: Aetna, Amgen, Cigna, Eli Lilly, Genentech, Google, Medtronic, Microsoft, Novartis, Pfizer, United Healthcare, and Wellpoint.

J.D. helped establish Health Grades Inc., a publicly traded health care information company based in Denver, which he served as vice chairman of the board until 2008.

From 2007 until 2011, Mr. Kleinke was the CEO of Mount Tabor, a Portland-based health care strategy and information technology consulting company founded to help Google, Microsoft and its partners build, test and launch systems for the transformation and movement of electronic medical information.

In 2004, Mr. Kleinke established the Omnimedix Institute, the non-profit that helped define, lead and safeguard the way for patients` access to their medical information on the Web.

During the 1990s, he was a founding executive of Solucient, the nation`s first pure-play health care information company. Before Solucient, J.D. was director of corporate programs at Sheppard Pratt Health System, the largest private psychiatric hospital in the U.S. While at Sheppard Pratt - and only 28 years old at the time - Mr. Kleinke developed and managed the nation`s first provider-based, managed mental health care system.

J.D.`s books, Bleeding Edge: The Business of Health Care in the New Century and Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System are required reading in many physician-executive MBA programs and health administration graduate programs in the U.S. His third book, Catching Babies - a novel about the training and culture of obstetrician/gynecologists - was published in 2011.

For both consulting clients and conference audiences across the health care, medical, corporate, policy and patient communities, J.D. provides a pragmatic and often humorous look at the collision of government reform, increasing patient economic empowerment, and emerging information and medical technologies - and their combined effects on the future challenges and opportunities for today`s health care organization.

Publications

Catching Babies: A Novel

Birth, and death. Two ends of the same spectrum. And sometimes the only person standing between is a tired, overworked resident with personal problems of her own.

Welcome to the world of Catching Babies. In the halls of a busy metropolitan teaching hospital, a group of OB/GYN doctors complete their residencies and embark on ambitious careers, all while trying to hold their lives together at the seams. Jay is running from a life he`s tried to leave behind, while Katie sacrifices everything she has to serve an endless parade of needy patients. Anna is out trying to save the world, while Tracy is trying to save twins dying in utero. Based on true stories from delivery rooms and labor decks, Catching Babies spins the doctors` stories into a gripping mosaic of the obsessions, the anxieties, and the heroism of doctors who have chosen to preside over life's greatest medical drama -- high-risk childbirth.

Titles

Health Reform is Now: What is Health Care "Reform" and What Does It Mean for Your Health Care Organization?
It finally happened. Decades of a hybrid private market and government health care system have resulted in one of the most costly and least efficient systems in the world - and the political stars finally lined up and passed a "reform" plan. Based on the hope that government may be able to fix what deregulated markets cannot, and serious, systemic health reform has been signed into federal law. What does the plan look like? Will it work? What does it mean for your organization? How will broader market forces toward ever more patient cost-sharing enhance, hamper or complicate the reform plan? Everything we think we know about our health care system will look in the very near future is completely speculative. And that is before factoring in the wave of new medical information, data access and patient communities coming online now as part of "Health 2.0." This session examines the concurrent effects of government reform, increasing patient economic empowerment, and emerging patient information technologies on today`s health care organization. Combined with lessons from the emerging field of consumer behavioral economics, and observations from the cutting edge of the patient-centric health information revolution, this session will outline how your organization can navigate a health care system confronting the greatest changes in its bizarre, hundred year history.

eHealth 2.0: The Once and Future Health Care Information Revolution
A new generation of health information technology is emerging - and this one may finally ready for primetime, thanks to $17.2 billion in stimulus funding! Beyond the government`s sudden willingness to fund the computerization of health care, there has been explosive growth in e-prescribing and other electronic medical tools, as a new generation of providers comes online - and as patient communities have also emerged online, allowing patients to share exquisite details about their medical conditions and experiences. To attract and retain the most lucrative (i.e., well-off, well-insured and web-enabled) segments of the market, providers and payers at the vanguard are promoting the use of provider/patient e-visits and remote systems to manage disease, track changes in symptoms, and share data. New reimbursement methods and models - including insurer-paid e-visits and annual "connectivity" fees from patients - are emerging in parallel with these technologies, as the health IT community finally addresses the need for privacy, security, physician income preservation, and liability protection. The sum total of these trends is the long overdue computerization of health care, and the "liquification" of patient data from paper charts and institutional silos - with far-reaching strategic consequences for every organization in health care.

The Patient Is In: Health Care`s Next Economic Revolution
Over the past two decades, the locus of medical decision making - via the rise and fall of "managed care" - has shifted from physician to health plan to patient. Tiered co-payments and the introduction of high-deductible health insurance, coupled with Health Savings Accounts, are ushering in the inevitable decline of first-dollar coverage by health plans and the often irrational demand-inducement behavior of consumers - a decline which will accelerate to full collapse with the next downturn in the health insurance underwriting cycle. How will those patients behave when they are confronted daily with a financial document that looks like a 401(k) plan statement - one which shrinks with every doctor visit, lab test, new prescription and refill? Everything we think we know about how consumers will behave when purchasing routine care from these new cash accounts - and about how desperately ill patients will behave when confronted with draining those same accounts when fighting a life-threatening illness - is completely speculative. This keynote session examines keys moments in health care system history and policy for clues as to what the future will hold for all of us, not just as patients, but as real health care consumers.

The High Price of Progress: Who Pays for Medicine`s Good Bad Luck?
The majority of medical research compels the utilization of ever newer and ever more expensive drugs and other medical technologies. At the same time, the majority of actions by private and public health plans seek to constrain their use. The result is an emerging collision course - between the march of medical science and the countermarch of medical policy - arising from often bitterly divided views about the optimal use of expensive medical resources. Pharmacy costs in particular are rising in excess of general and medical cost inflation, leading to calls for price and utilization controls by public and private payers. Such controls would be ineffective and counterproductive because they would attempt to reverse two profound, historic phenomena at work in the US health care system: the added costs associated with breakthrough medicines represent a major structural shift from the provision of traditional medical services to the consumption of medical products; they also represent the creation of economic, social, and public health utility that we value as a society. Nonetheless, the turmoil in the private health care system`s approach to managing health benefits and costs - currently undergoing replication for Medicaid and the new Medicare drug benefit - can be remedied through adoption of a value-based (rather than price-based) approach to pharmaceutical spending - and all stakeholders in the system have the opportunity to enable, rather than resist, the hard economic news associated with all of our good clinical luck.

Chaos in the Clinic: Leadership Strategies for the Post-Modern Health Care System
Managed care has been like chemotherapy for a sick health care system - harsh medicine for the system`s economic, behavioral and organizational disorders a century in the making. The cost and quality problems that gave rise to the national managed care companies in the 1990s shook up our entire medical financing and delivery system. But, like many chemotherapies, did the cure prove worse than the disease? Or are certain aspects of health care`s cost and quality problems simply incurable? How can provider organizations cope with a system that, as payers attempt to re-engineer it around reimbursement, seems to yield only more chaos? This presentation provides a broad and often humorous overview of business and leadership strategies providers are using to position themselves to survive and thrive in a world of intense financial and organizational pressure.

Health Reform is Now: What is Health Care "Reform" and What Does It Mean for You & Your Family
It finally happened. Decades of a hybrid private market and government health care system have resulted in one of the most costly and least efficient systems in the world. Combined with a renewed belief that government may be able to fix what deregulated markets cannot, and serious health reform has been signed into federal law. What does the plan look like? Will it work? What does it mean for you and your family? And how will broader market forces toward ever more patient cost-sharing enhance, hamper or complicate the reform plan? Everything we think we know about how our health care system will look in the very near future is completely speculative. And that is before factoring in the wave of new medical information, data access and patient communities coming online and into their prime right now. This session examines the combined effects of government reform, increasing patient power (and financial responsibility), and emerging information technologies on you and your family. This session will outline how you can navigate a health care system confronting the greatest changes in its odd hundred-year history.