Joe Flower

Biography

With nearly 30 years’ experience, Joe Flower has emerged as the premier observer and thought leader on the deep forces changing healthcare in the United States and around the world. He has explored the future of healthcare with clients ranging from the World Health Organization, the Global Business Network, and the U.K. National Health Service, to the majority of state hospital associations in the U.S. as well as many of the provincial associations and ministries in Canada, and an extraordinary variety of other players across healthcare - professional associations, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, health plans, physician groups, and numerous hospitals. He has worked on change and the future with the U.S. Department of Defense, Airbus and ArianeSpace, and a number of governments in China.

Flower is the author of hundreds of articles. For over 20 years he was a contributing editor and regular columnist at the Healthcare Forum Journal. When the Healthcare Forum became the Health Forum of the American Hospital Association, he went on to a regular column in Hospitals and Health Networks Online. For 12 years he has written a regular column for Physician Executive, the Journal of the American College of Physician Executives. He is the author, as well, of a number of seminal articles of the Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities movement.

Flower was a contributing writer for Wired Magazine in its explosive early years, and a columnist for the pioneering health websites DNA.com and HealthCentral.com.

His deep research into the nature of change in organizations and people led to interviews with the top thinkers on organizational change, from Peter Drucker to Peter Senge and Ari de Geus. He went deeper, into the study of chaos theory, Eastern thought, and martial arts, eventually earning a black belt in Ueshiba Aikido.

Flower was a founding member of the International Health Futures Network and the principal author of the landmark forecast, “Technological Advances and the Next 50 Years of Cardiology,” Journal of the American College of Cardiology (vol. 35, no. 4, 2000).

His other writings include:

• China’s Futures Global Business Network 2000 (co-author)
• The 21st Century Healthcare Leader Jossey-Bass 1999 (co-author)
• Japan’s Futures, Global Business Network 1998 (Executive Editor)
• Leading Change: A Key Challenge for Board-Management Teams, The Governance Institute, 1998
• The Encyclopedia of the Future MacMillan, 1996 (co-author)
• Best Practices in Collaboration to Improve Health: Creating Community Jazz, (principal co-author), The Healthcare Forum and the California Wellness Foundation, 1996
• Prince of the Magic Kingdom: Michael Eisner and the Re-Making of Disney John Wiley 1991
• Age Wave Random House 1989 (co-author)

Titles

How We Can Drive Down Real Costs in Health Care
The emerging future of health care shows definite and startling features: Far beyond merely "bending the cost curve" of health care inflation, various organizations across the country are showing how to actually drive the cost down by substantial amounts, without depriving anyone of anything. What is emerging from the private sector is a coherent collaborative strategy. Flower shows how it works and how to make it work, with clear examples, models, and parameters.

Where We are Really Headed: Health Care 2020 and Beyond
The trends, vectors, and forces that are rapidly re-shaping health care are far deeper and broader than what is written into the health care reform act. Within a decade the structure, economics, legal position, and technological underpinnings of health care will be nearly unrecognizable. The organizations that thrive in these changes will be the organizations that best understand, anticipate, and build for them.

Facing The Physician Crisis
More than half of our current physicians intend to retire or cut back their practices at the very time that 30 to 40 million new people are entering the system, and the Baby Boom is entering its years of "peak medicine." The necessity of producing more doctors, and emphasizing primary care, is obvious, but the real answer is far larger. Helping doctors become more efficient and effective could in effect greatly increase the number of available doctors and the time they have to give to patients, and restructuring and re-thinking how we do much of health care (particularly chronic care) could make the whole process far more effective and efficient -- and far less expensive.

Nurses: A Key To Better Faster Cheaper Health Care
We now actually have considerable experience, data, examples, and outcomes of pilots that show exactly how to provide better health care, for less, for everyone. They have a number of factors in common, such as much more emphasis on primary care, prevention, and chronic care; teamwork; tight control of processes; and partnering with patients. All of these clearly illuminate making far better use of nurses - at the very moment that we are losing nurses out of direct patient care every day. Nurses are key to a better future. Let's take a look at how that works.

The End of Health Care As We Know It: Techniques, Technologies, and Treatments
New technologies, pharmaceuticals, and methods of treatment will over the coming decade short-circuit much of today's medical care, replacing it with cheaper, easier, more precise, more effective techniques that will produce startling changes in health care.

Data-Driven Health Care: Better Faster Cheaper
For the first time, we have the potential to use real data to drive the effectiveness of health care. But large practical obstacles bar the way. We can't get there from here without specific action and real leadership from across the industry.

The Next Health Care: Talks For Specific Industry Sectors
Flower regularly brings his analysis of the future to specific industry sectors and stakeholders, such as:

� Hospitals, health care systems, and hospital associations
� Clinics and clinic associations
� Physician groups and other professional associations
� Behavioral health
� Long-term care and hospice
� Pharmacies
� Pharmaceutical companies
� Health care financial managers
� Health plans and managed care
� Major vendors
� Employers
� Investors

For each of these sectors, Flower unpacks the unfolding changes engulfing health care, and illustrates precisely how those trends and forces will re-shape the sector, re-define their part of the industry, will shift their goals, their finances, their strategies, and their effectiveness.