Surgeon General

Application to Join Surgeon General’s Digital Vanguard Team – O4 and Below Only

Posted on

Here is a message from the Navy Surgeon General announcing this new techology initiative.  The application can be found here – Digital Vanguard Application Package.

 

From: Faison, C Forrest (Forrest) VADM USN BUMED FCH VA (US)

Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:28 PM

Subject: DIGITAL VANGUARD

As you all well know, the technology landscape is rapidly advancing and fundamentally changing expectations and behaviors in all industries to include healthcare. As the military population rapidly adopts new innovations into their lives, there will be an expectation that their healthcare providers leverage these technologies in the delivery of care and as a means to improve health. Navy Medicine must look to enhance innovation and accelerate our velocity of learning if we are going to maximize health and readiness of a young and tech savvy population.

We need a sustained infusion of new ideas, experiences, and approaches from outside of the Military Health System and healthcare to meet our mission and build tomorrow’s leaders. To address this need, Navy Medicine is
establishing a “Digital Vanguard” of 75-100 junior enlisted and officer staff who will participate in various events to increase their situational awareness of emerging technology and how other industries are leveraging it and share their discoveries with the rest of our Enterprise. The expectation is that this cohort will serve as a distributed network of forward thinkers advising Navy Medicine leadership on how to capitalize on opportunities that new technologies can bring to improve health and readiness. I want to be sure you are aware and ask for your support as the group will be distributed throughout the enterprise and their participation will require a long term commitment across multiple commands. Expected participation is 10 hours a quarter as well as some TAD for training and education.

The BUMED Digital Health Office will liaison with you/your staffs and the Corps Chiefs to identify members for the group from across the various Corps. All applicants must have a command and Corps Chief endorsement. Costs for travel, lodging and fees associated with events will be funded centrally by the BUMED Digital Health Office. Travel logistic coordination will also be managed by the Digital Health Office to minimize any additional burden on our Commands. Applications are expected to be released in late September with final membership decisions completed by the end of November 2016.

My thanks in advance for your support in this endeavor.

Very respectfully,

C. Forrest Faison III, M.D.
VADM MC USN
Surgeon General, U.S. Navy
Chief, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery

This entry was posted in Surgeon General, Technology, Uncategorized and tagged , .

Surgeon General’s Guidance & Value-Based Care

Posted on

The Navy Surgeon General just released his Commander’s Guidance for Navy Medicine:

Navy Medicine Commanders Guidance

As you will read, Readiness, Value, and Jointness have been replaced by Readiness, Health, and Partnerships.  In addition, there is a focus on value-based care.  A good article on value-based care from the Harvard Business Review can be found at this link.  I’ve pasted the executive summary below:

In health care, the days of business as usual are over. Around the world, every health care system is struggling with rising costs and uneven quality, despite the hard work of well- intentioned, well-trained clinicians. Health care leaders and policy makers have tried countless incremental fixes—attacking fraud, reducing errors, enforcing practice guidelines, making patients better “consumers,” implementing electronic medical records—but none have had much impact.

It’s time for a fundamentally new strategy. At its core is maximizing value for patients: that is, achieving the best outcomes at the lowest cost. We must move away from a supply- driven health care system organized around what physicians do and toward a patient-centered system organized around what patients need. We must shift the focus from the volume and profitability of services provided—physician visits, hospitalizations, procedures, and tests—to the patient outcomes achieved. And we must replace today’s fragmented system, in which every local provider offers a full range of services, with a system in which services for particular medical conditions are concentrated in health-delivery organizations and in the right locations to deliver high-value care.

The strategy for moving to a high-value health care delivery system comprises six interdependent components: organizing around patients’ medical conditions rather than physicians’ medical specialties, measuring costs and outcomes for each patient, developing bundled prices for the full care cycle, integrating care across separate facilities, expanding geographic reach, and building an enabling IT platform.

The transformation to value-based health care is well under way. Some organizations, such as the Cleveland Clinic and Germany’s Schön Klinik, have undertaken large-scale changes involving multiple components of the value agenda. The result has been striking improvements in outcomes and efficiency, and growth in market share.

This entry was posted in Surgeon General, Value-Based Care and tagged , .