In this episode we talk to Jeff Williamson, MD, MHS, Director of the Center for Healthcare innovation, about what is on the horizon for patient care and how it impacts value.
About Center for Healthcare Innovation
Transcript:
Can you talk to me about Center for Healthcare Innovation and the Center for Aging? What is the mission of each?
Yep. Well, the Center for Healthcare Innovation was really founded, uh, on the concept that we needed a vehicle for more rapid communication and translation of our discovery into the patient’s environment. Whether that's wellness or actually the delivery of care, for example, in the hospital. So, Wake Forest is known around the world for its research. It's a research institution. But many of the things we discover are implemented 20 years after the discovery or they're implemented in some health system halfway across the nation. So, that was really the purpose for the Center for Healthcare Innovations.
We've had for many years a sister center, so to speak, Wake Forest Innovations, which is about commercializing discovery. You know, a new kind of hip replacement or a new enzyme. But our Center is specifically tasked with taking a lot of that discovery that's not commercial allowable but has tremendous value to patients, their families, and to the health care system. And getting that more rapidly to the front lines.
You also asked me about geriatric medicine. Wake Forest really has a clinical entity, it’s called the Section on Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, which I’m head of. Then there’s a Center for Healthy Aging and Alzheimer’s Prevention. I’m a clinical leader of that. The Center is actually led by doctors Stephen Kritchevsky and Suzanne Craft. They’re research faculty. But our mission of all of that together is to find more ways to help prevent disability with aging. So, when I mean disability, a simple way to put it is how can we prevent the two most common reasons that someone moves from their home and into an assisted living or nursing home facility. And either they have difficulty walking or difficulty remembering. So, our main thrust of our research is understanding how to delay or prevent loss of particularly leg strength and walking and loss of brain health. The most common form of which is Alzheimer's disease. That's really the purpose of Geriatrics in the Center for Health Care Innovation.
And even all of our clinical care, uh, when I take care of patients, I'm thinking of them holistically. How can I help you preserve your ability to walk and think? Even if you have 10 diseases at 90, the successful patient to me might have 10 diseases, but they're still interacting with their family, they're remembering those interactions, and they're still able to physically contribute to family life. You know, we all want to be that patient that at 95, just doesn't wake up one morning and the night before we were, you know, hugging our honey or reading to our grandchildren, tucking great grandchildren taking the bed. That's the goal. So, that's what we do, and we really try to marry those two goals between the Center for Healthcare Innovation, that I’ll talk about a little bit later, and Geriatric Medicine and the Sticht Center for Healthy Aging and Alzheimer's prevention.
Well you touched on this a moment ago, but I would like you to elaborate on how you see this work impacting patients’ quality of life?
Yes. Uh, I see a lot of patients, you know, journey through the health care system and at the end of that journey they're not really sure are they better off or not. Um, and has the...
