Surgeon wants the healthcare system to change

Dr. Firouz Daneshgari is a Surgeon-Scientist, Educator and Entrepreneur and the Founder of Bowtie Medical. PHOTO PROVIDED BY ASCOT MEDIA GROUP.
Dr. Firouz Daneshgari is a Surgeon-Scientist, Educator and Entrepreneur and the Founder of Bowtie Medical. PHOTO PROVIDED BY ASCOT MEDIA GROUP.

 Surgeon wants the healthcare system to change

By Tia Carol Jones

Dr. Firouz Daneshgari is disrupting the healthcare system with his book, “Health Guardianship: The Remedy to the Sick Care System.” Daneshgari is a Surgeon-Scientist, Educator and Entrepreneur, who has worked at the University of Colorado, Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. He founded Bowtie Medical in 2014. Its goal is to create systemic innovations to bring efficiency and value to the healthcare delivery system.

Daneshgari wrote the book because while serving on the Board at Case Western Reserve University, his eyes were opened that healthcare is delivered through 5,000 hospitals in the United States that are in the business of sick care.

“They are very much financial institutions that come up with all the mechanics and protocols and systems that any other financial institution runs. The drivers of the revenue for the hospitals are clinical services.

 The clinical services, diagnostic and therapeutic that they do when people get ill. Therefore, they have a financial interest in people being sicker. The sicker the people are the more services they can provide, the more money they can make,” Daneshgari said, adding the problem with hospitals they don’t know how to control their costs.

Daneshgari pointed to independent research that shows 50% of services delivered through the hospitals are waste – services that generate revenue for the hospitals but don’t create desired health outcomes for the user.

Daneshgari wanted to know why the United States’ healthcare system is becoming more expensive and has become the number one cause for personal bankruptcies. He went to business school for two years and studied how the hospitals went from being charity institutions of the late 19th Century to financial institutions and why the United States is the most expensive healthcare system in the world.

Daneshgari believes the United States healthcare system is expensive and mispriced and that “we are spending too much on the thing and getting the worse service.” He believes misalignments, which include misalignment between the doctors and the patients; misalignment between third party payer and the consumer; and the consumer is not aware of the waste because they don’t see the total cost of healthcare.
In the book, Daneshgari also gives a solution that he said is readily available. It relies on innovation and American ingenuity to reverse the misalignments.

“First things first, the primary care should not be the agent of the hospital, it should be the agent of the consumers,” he said, pointing to a model called direct primary care, in which a consumer pays $100 a month and that physician becomes a healthcare agent, available 24/7.
With Bowtie Medical, Daneshgari has created subscription-based primary care, along with coupling the primary care with the guardian – nurses, medical assistants, advisors – who have been trained to understand price variability in the market. These guardians also know where the independent facilities are located and they can do price shopping for the consumer and can advise you on appropriate care.
Daneshgari explained the bowtie is a risk management philosophy. The knot of the bowtie is the event that someone wants to prevent. The left side are the things to prevent the event. The right side are the things where the event happens and then it is solved.

“If we turn our attention to the left side of the bowtie, we can prevent the majority if not all of the chronic conditions,” he said. “We know scientifically, it is very very possible.” Daneshgair wants his solution to become part of the National conversations regarding healthcare in the United States.

For more information about Bowtie Medical, visit www.bowtiemedical.com. For more information about the Why Can’t We Have it All? The Missing Pieces in Our Healthcare Podcast, visit www.wcwha.com.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this story are those solely of the author. If you are interested in learning more about the book and its author, please  Dr. Daneshgari direct.  

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