NYC November 6: Tackling Medical Harm-the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S.

 Ending Medical Harm: Tackling the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. 

     

Posted 10/28/13 at 1:21 pm  FiDA highlight


Columbia School of Journalism Lecture Hall (2950 Broadway at 116th St.)


November 6, 2013, 10am – 3pm


10:00-10:15 am: Welcome - Chris Meyer, Consumer Reports, Vice President, External Affairs.

10:15-10:30 am: Introduction: The Overlooked Consumer Perspective


Lisa McGiffert, Campaign Manager, Safe Patient Project

10:30- 11:30 am Pulling Back the Curtain: Translating patient safety data into useable public information.

 The panel will discuss current and future ideas for turning data into information that can be used by consumers, patients and health care providers to improve medical care and save lives.

Charlie Ornstein – ProPublica
John Santa, MD, MPH – Consumer Reports’ Health Rating Center
Pete Eisler, Reporter, USA Today
Moderator: Marshall Allen – ProPublica

11:30 -12:00 pm Bill Baby Bill: Today’s health care mantra & what it means for consumers


Rosemary Gibson – Author and public interest advocate will discuss how overuse of medical care is unnecessary, expensive and can be dangerous.

12:00-1230 pm: Lunch

12:30-1:30 pm: Bad Bearings: The rise and fall of the metal-on-metal hip


Steven Tower, MD: An orthopedic surgeon who got a metal-on-metal hip implant will share his journey on becoming an “accidental authority on the health hazards of metal-on-metal hip implants.”

1:30-2:30 pm: Stories Matter: Publishing patient experiences to drive public policy change.

This panel will explore participants’ transformation after the pain of death and injury of a loved one to becoming expert patient safety advocates. Their work demonstrates the important role that patients and consumers are playing in the push to end medical harm.

John James, PhD- Patient safety advocate and author of “A New, Evidence-Based Estimate of Patient Harms Associated with Hospital Care,” published by The Journal of Patient Safety.


Pat Masters- Author of Design to Survive, 9 ways an IKEA Approach Can Fix Health Care and Save Lives.


Dan Walter- Author of Collateral Damage: A Patient, a New Procedure & the Learning Curve.
Moderator- 

Suzanne Henry, Policy Analyst, Consumers Union Safe Patient Project

2:30-3:00 pm: A Consumer Movement 10 Years in the Making


Lisa McGiffert will cover a retrospective of accomplishments and work ahead for the Safe Patient Project Network.

Speaker Bios

Chris Meyer- Vice President of Consumers Union External Affairs and Information Services. He supervises CU’s multi-state advocacy campaign work and activist recruitment. Chris also supervises the Communications Division and Strategic Planning and Information Services. Chris came to CU in October 2004 after working for 20 years for the New York Public Interest Research Group, a student-directed research and advocacy group focused on consumer and environmental issues. He served as the group’s executive director from 1997-2004.

Lisa McGiffert- Manager of Consumers Union’s Safe Patient Project which works on state and national levels to make information available to consumers about medical harm, focusing on healthcare-acquired infections, medical device safety, medical errors, and physician accountability. Beginning in 2003, the campaign initiated state laws to publish hospital infection rates and raise public awareness about the problem; today more than half of the states and Medicare require such reporting. The campaign’s collaboration with individuals who have personal experiences with medical harm has developed into a national consumer activist network to make health care safer. McGiffert routinely lends the consumer voice on these issues at conferences, with the media and when serving on national and state-based patient safety advisory committees. From 1991-2003, McGiffert directed CU advocacy efforts on the full array of health issues in Texas including access to care, health insurance, physician and hospital regulation and quality of care. Prior that, she was the legislative director for the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services and a juvenile probation/parole officer.

Charles Ornstein-Reporter for Propublica. Charles was a lead reporter on a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times in collaboration with Tracy Weber, titled “The Troubles at King/Drew” hospital that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for public service in 2005. His ProPublica series, with Tracy Weber, “When Caregivers Harm: California’s Unwatched Nurses” was a finalist for a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Ornstein reported for the Times starting in 2001, in the last five years largely in partnership with Weber. Earlier, Ornstein spent five years as a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. He is president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and a former Kaiser Family Foundation media fellow.

John Santa- Director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center. John has been Director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center since 2008. Previously he practiced internal medicine in Oregon and served in administrative roles in hospitals, insurance companies, and medical groups that insure and care for commercial, Medicare and Medicaid patients. From 1999 to 2003 he was Administrator of the Oregon Office for Health Policy and Research, a state agency concerned with Medicaid and other areas of health policy.

Pete Eisler- Investigative reporter at USA TODAY, where he’s reported on everything from lax enforcement of U.S. safe drinking water laws to medial errors and superbugs in US hospitals, including the series “When Health care makes you sick.” In 2013, Eisler shared the Gerald Loeb Award for online journalism, the Hillman Prize for Web-based investigative reporting, and the duPont-Columbia Award for digital journalism. His work also has been honored in the Barlett and Steele Awards for Investigative Reporting, the National Headliner Awards, the National Press Club Awards and the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. He is a board member and treasurer at the Fund for Investigative Journalism, which provides reporting grants to independent journalists, and he volunteers as a high school teaching fellow for the News Literacy Project in Washington, DC.

Marshall Allen-Reporter for ProPublica. His “Do No Harm: Hospital Care in Las Vegas,” written in collaboration with Alex Richards for the Las Vegas Sun, was honored with several journalism awards, including the Harvard Kennedy School’s 2011 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for local reporting. His health-care coverage was recognized as the best in the country in 2009 by the Association of Healthcare Journalists (AHCJ). In 2007, he won second place for his beat reporting for the Sun where he spent five years before coming to ProPublica in 2011. He has been instrumental in creating ProPublica’s Patient Harm Community on Facebook. Before he was in journalism, Allen spent five years in full-time ministry, including three years in Nairobi, Kenya. He has a Master’s degree in Theology.

Rosemary Gibson – Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center; an editor for JAMA Internal Medicine “Less is More,” author of Wall of Silence: The Untold Story of the Medical Mistakes that Kill and Injure Millions of Americans, The Treatment Trap: How the Overuse of Medical Care is Wrecking Your Health and What You Can Do to Prevent It,  Medical Meltdown, and Battle Over Health Care.

Steven Tower, MD – Tower specializes in orthopedics in Anchorage Alaska and was featured in a 2012 Consumer Reports article about medical devices, which led to patients contacting him from all over the world. Dr. Tower, who was “captured by why hips fail” since his training in hip replacements, describes himself as an accidental authority on metal-metal complications following his own experience of being poisoned by a metal-on-metal hip implant. This experience launched him on a passionate quest to educate physicians and patients about the perils of this device. Along the way he ran into roadblocks from the FDA and his own profession.

John James-Patient safety advocate and author of “A New, Evidence-based Estimate of Patient Harms Associated with Hospital Care, published by The Journal of Patient Safety, Sept 2013. This estimate has been hailed as a much needed update on the death statistics published by the Institute of Medicine in 1999. John’s Patient Safety America monthly newsletter is dedicated to his 19-year old son, John Alexander James, who died as a result of uninformed, careless, and unethical care by cardiologists, and provides critical analysis of published studies and reports on medical harm. He serves on the Texas advisory committee overseeing implementation of laws requiring reporting of health care-acquired infections and medical errors. He is the author of A Sea of Broken Hearts: Patient Rights in a Dangerous, Profit-Driven Health Care System.

Pat Masters-Author of Design to Survive, 9 ways an IKEA approach can fix health care and save lives. Through colorful analogies, gripping stories from families and top doctors, and her quest to find out what happened to her own father, Pat has served up key strategies for patients, families and health care providers, with the conviction that we can do better. Pat is a veteran news and medical reporter at several New England television stations; the creator of the Patient Pod, a patient engagement & empowerment tool that brings patient autonomy and communication to the bedside, that is undergoing a clinical trial in a hospital system with “teachback” to reduce hospital re-admissions; and an active blogger. Her blog posts at Islands of Excellence have been cross-posted by the National Patient Safety Foundation, The HealthCare Blog, KevinMD and Reporting on Health. She worked to pass Rhode Island’s hospital infection reporting and serves on the state’s advisory committee to implement that law.

Dan Walter- Author of Collateral Damage: A Patient, a New Procedure, and the Learning Curve. “MY larger purpose in writing this book is to tell Pam that she does matter, and that her life is important — and her story is important – and it deserves to be honestly told…” What unfolds in Dan’s book is a compelling behind the scenes look at the corrupting corporate influence on American’s health care system. A review by David Mayer said “… this book should be required reading for all resident physicians and health science students entering the field.” Dan has served as a Communications Director of the American News Network and for US Senator Herb Kohl and as a political consultant with Joe Trippi. He was a technical writer for Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s health care reform effort.

Invest in Hopeful Documentary on Patient Harm: Breaking the Wall of Silence

1.  Click Here!  Documentary director, Carolyn McCulley from CityGate Films talks about the project

2.  Click Here!  Invest today:  

Kickstarter campaign ends on March 31, 2013

http://www.leanblog.org/2013/03/podcast-168-carolyn-mcculley-breaking-the-wall-of-silence/

 Notes and links:

▪                The book upon which the title of the film is based (as a homage, not a direct translation of the book into film): Wall of Silence: The Untold Story of the Medical Mistakes That Kill and Injure Millions of Americans

▪                The book by Dr. Marty Makary she mentions: Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care

▪                Statistics on patent safety and quality problems

▪                Past episode with Sorrel King

▪                Earlier podcast with Clare Crawford-Mason that includes a discussion of her film “Good News…How Hospitals Heal Themselves“

▪                Episode with Dr. Richard Shannon talking about Lean and infection reduction

▪                The “seven pillars” approach to improving patient safety

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About LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology. Mark is author of the Shingo Award-winning book Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen. Learn more about Mark’s on-site and public workshops. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus

Mayo Clinic: Selling Sickness or Reform Leadership?

Mayo proposal is sound, but industryis a problem

•                Article by: PAUL JOHN SCOTT  , Star Tribune Updated: March 16, 2013 - 7:50 PM

The question about Mayo’s plan for a Destination Medical Center isn’t whether it makes sense for Rochester and for the state. (It does.) The question is whether Mayo will seize this moment to lead change in an industry gone awry.

Rochester – At the forum a couple weeks ago to discuss the big news, they did not plan for the mad crush of bodies. They booked a too-small room, and the mob spilled out the door. Open meetings around here are usually a snore, but the surprise announcement of the Mayo Clinic’s plan for a Destination Medical Center drew the largest crowd to ever show up for one of these things. Judging by some of the faces, the proposal is especially inviting to the city’s growing corps of creatives, culture mavens, biotech wonks, coastal transplants and TED Talk fans. We in Rochester know this is a critical moment that may not come our way again, and it feels close. Nearly everyone in the room wanted this thing to happen.

Chances are the Legislature is going to come around to the DMC idea as well — if not for its merits, simply because of the way privately funded construction budgets with a B in them have a way of focusing lawmakers’ minds. The numbers are unprecedented: The plan promises $3.5 billion in local capital investments by Mayo over the next 20 years. It promises $2 billion in Mayo-leveraged private investment in urban living, entertainment, dining, arts and cultural amenities. It promises 30,000 new jobs. The catch: When new tax revenues from this expansion are produced, it asks for 10 percent of those funds, roughly $585 million over 20 years, for roads, sidewalks, parking, transit and sewers needed to support the new buildings.

So it’s not a handout, not by any stretch. Mayo is planning on growing faster than the tax base can keep up, and has figured out a novel way to get around the problem. The financial model is a first in the nation.

What’s not to like? Critics have objected to diverting any revenues, even hypothetical ones, toward a prosperous city when state revenues are scarce as it is. They object to the granting of special treatment to one employer over others, even if that firm plays an outsize role in the state economy. (With 30,000 employees, Mayo is the largest private employer in the state.)

Others see trouble ahead, given the likelihood of the need for eminent domain or the forced sale of private property through court-appointed means. (To be honest, a lot of buildings in this town make a good case for eminent domain.) One could also ask why the state should subsidize Rochester’s new plazas in exchange for new Mayo expansion when the clinic was on track to spend $5 billion over the next 20 years anyway, given its current spending patterns.

This presumes a bit. Mayo could always build elsewhere (even if last month there were four tower cranes over its two Rochester campuses). The complaint expressed by House Tax Committee chair Rep. Ann Lenczewski that the project is a “massive public subsidy” that will somehow cause “a tax increase for everyone else” is consistent with her view on projects like this in the past. But it doesn’t track with the reality of the bill.

The state loses no money; it only gets less new money. She is essentially complaining about getting a little bit less of funds the state was never going to get in the first place.

Now there’s an argument to make a Democrat wince.

These criticisms may sound high-minded, but there is a football stadium ready to break ground that suggests any pushback to Mayo DMC has less to do with the sanctity of the public purse than with residual regional rivalries too tedious to mention. In other words, if you support the state of medical practice today, it’s a no-brainer to support Mayo DMC. And I don’t say that just because I want more public sculpture at the base of my street.

But the moment bears mention for reasons other than Rochester’s options when it comes to sushi. Mayo says it is asking for this partnership in order to retain its position in an evolving health care marketplace. The clinic says there are 13,000 people coming into Medicare coverage every day, 30 million new enrollees in private insurance next year, and a future in which a small handful of global brands will serve patients who travel to destination cities for their health care. It has watched competitors in Baltimore, Houston and Cleveland engage in an arms race to attract these patients, and is determined to ensure its place on that list.

At the recent meeting, a Mayo spokesperson could not spell out the precise use of the $3.5 billion in new buildings the clinic plans to create — she only knew that more buildings will need to be built. So this seems less like a need in front of Mayo officials than like a strategic decision to stay in front by staying big.

Going big may make sense in a rational marketplace, but medicine is no rational marketplace. We’re not talking here about the usual problems one associates with health care — the lack of transparency in pricing, the lack of negotiated drug buying power in the government, and the problems with fee-for-service medicine. Those are all drags on the system, but they miss a deeper issue.

The market Mayo now seeks to dominate is that of serving sick people, and if one is honest about it, these are strange times to be fighting for market share of sick people. The reason: We have witnessed a near complete takeover of medicine by private industry. The product of this takeover — let’s call it the medical-industrial complex — has shown that if its market is sick people, it will not hesitate to create new customers.

How does the medical-industrial complex create new sick people? Not by making people sick — not intentionally, anyway. It markets sickness. It lowers the threshold for being diagnosed with an illness.

It broadens the symptom profile of an illness. It encourages doctors to treat symptoms as one would an illness that meets the formal criteria of diagnosis. It develops tests that trigger unnecessary procedures. It funds patient advocacy groups to “raise awareness” about the need for ineffective screening methods and expensive treatments. It funds medical societies, medical journals, clinical trials, the FDA, individual doctors, health systems, magazine ads, television spots, social-media campaigns and political campaigns in both parties, and it feeds illness-pushing stories to overworked health reporters.

I know, because I have written a few of them myself.

Private interests have merged with the very organizations Mayo finds in its path to customers. The massive Cleveland Clinic complex that has placed Mayo on its heels — it was going to be called a “Medical Mart” until someone thought better of it — includes a facility built by GE Heathcare, makers of our ubiquitous screening technologies. But as Peter Gotzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Center has demonstrated, 80 percent of Denmark has gone without mammograms for decades, while 20 percent of the country has been screened regularly. This “makes for the perfect control group,” he says, and when you compare the Danes who had mammograms with those who did not, there is no difference in mortality. Both groups experienced a drop in mortality around the introduction of drugs like Tamoxifen, yet mammograms got all the credit. This is comparable to the way in which device makers have taken credit for a drop in heart disease mortality during a period in which millions of Americans quit smoking.

You don’t need to visit a specialist — you can see the takeover of medicine during an hour in the office of your primary care provider.

The creation of clinical practice guidelines, directives conceived by doctors being paid by industry, has turned family medicine away from listening to the experiences of patients and toward the monitoring of blood markers denoting overblown risk factors for disease, surrogates for illness that can then be controlled by expensive drugs. Some of the most widely used drug treatments today serve the needs of the drug industry, not patients. They lower cholesterol or blood sugar without reducing the incidence of disease, and yet they are the sort of reasons we are so often told to “Know Your Numbers.”

We cannot count on the medical literature to clear up the problem.

Years of abuse have made it a repository of spin. Clinical trials that used statistical slight of hand to make failed trials look successful (see “Bad Pharma,” by Ben Goldacre). Review articles on new drugs or illnesses written by drug industry ghostwriters, signed for pay by influential doctors, then placed by professional publication planning agencies into credulous journals in exchange for hefty reprint orders. Industry-funded clinical trials of new drugs in which doctors never saw patient reports, only summaries of data they were asked to trust.

And as government lawyers given access to industry e-mails have learned, if a study still somehow failed to show that a new drug is safe or indeed works, it was often either shelved, or intentionally published in academic Siberia. In its own journal, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Mayo recently published a proposed reform of these practices, but it was written by representatives from the very ghostwriting and drug companies that created the problem.

Disclosure of doctors’ conflicts was supposed to reform the system, but since the new disclosure rules, something funny has happened: Within medicine, long lists of side money have become a badge of honor.

As health policy expert Rosemary Gibson argued last month at “Selling Sickness: People before Profits,” a global meeting organized by Minneapolis health activist Kim Witczak, the problems in medicine today share disturbing similarities with banking. Too big to fail. Inflated salaries. Toxic assets, price bubbles, sophisticated products marketed to unsophisticated buyers and subsidized profits followed by socialized losses.

The Mayo Clinic did surely not create this environment, and when it comes to steering clear of unnecessary treatments and resisting the influence of industry, it does many things better than most. But Mayo is about to take a bold step forward within a system that has lost its moorings.

Let’s hope that as it does so, it seeks a way to reform, rather than simply prevail.

 -------

Paul John Scott is a writer in Rochester.

Invest in Patient Safety: Help Produce a Documentary

THIS IS THE LINK TO DONATE TO KICKSTARTER!    One dollar minimum-so everyone can participate.   Thank you!  Enjoy the trailer!

Forbes: John Nance, Rosemary Gibson, ePatient Dave DeBronkart, Regina Holliday

http://www.forbes.com/sites/leahbinder/2012/12/20/13-to-watch-in-2013-the-unsung-heroes-changing-health-care-forever/

Leah Binder  12/20/12  FiDA highlight added to indicate my particular heroes!

13 To Watch in 2013: The Unsung Heroes ChangingHealth Care Forever  

When I have a health problem, I talk to my doctor or nurse. But when our nation has a collective health problem, doctors aren’t the only ones who know best. While I could write a year’s worth of blogs about inspirational physicians or nurses who are transforming our health care system from the inside out, today I want to highlight some of the largely unsung heroes changing health care from the outside in: these are influential leaders who don’t wear stethoscopes or see patients, but have some important answers for us, from pilots and business leaders to game show titans and soccer moms.

Their influence comes through social media, conferences, publishing and even some peer reviewed medical journals. My prediction: they will make some history in 2013.

1. John Nance

Did you know that a checked bag on an airline flight is still exponentially safer than a patient in an American hospital? John Nance is a former airline pilot and veteran, who has taken lessons learned from airline safety to dissect hospital safety – and found the latter wanting. His books on the subject, most recently, “Charting the Course,” co-authored with his wife Kathleen Bartholomew (a national change maker of major influence herself, but a nurse so not on this list of outsiders), create a fictional situation where hospitals are run with the same safety rules and procedures as airlines. The entertaining book challenges almost everything we assume about proper hospital administration.

2. Al Lewis

This Harvard-educated policy specialist is considered by many the father of “disease management” — and like all good parents, he’s the first to note when his offspring are misbehaving. Now he’s imposing some discipline. He’s concerned that the benefits of prevention initiatives are often oversold by overzealous consultants and vendors, so he wrote a category bestselling book “Why Nobody Believes the Numbers” to show how the rosy scenarios don’t always add up.

3. Suzanne Delbanco

Many self-insured employers have an astonishing little provision buried in their contract with their health plan: they aren’t allowed to reveal the prices they are paying for health services. The employers are allowed to pay the bills, of course, but they just can’t tell employees how much they paid. Thanks to Suzanne Delbanco, and her organization Catalyst for Payment Reform (CPR), ridiculous restrictions like that will soon be a thing of the past. CPR helps purchasers — large employers and unions — set rules for health plans on issues like pricing and quality of care.

4. Francois de Brantes

Your hospital usually makes money if a patient gets an infection during their stay and your doctor stands to gain financially if he gives you the wrong care. As a businessman, Francois de Brantes was outraged by the perverse incentives in health care that drive costs up and drive quality down. He formed a non-profit called the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute to try to deal with the incentives problem, and his terrific collection of essays highlights his blunt and logical ideas for addressing them. Although de Brantes is not alone in calling for better economic incentives in health care, he is unrivaled in piecing together and even applying detailed strategies to the health care system, undaunted by the complexity involved.

5. Rosemary Gibson

A study by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Rand Corporation concluded that one-third of people who were told they needed heart bypass surgery did not need it. Studies have also shown inappropriate CT scans, other heart surgeries, back surgery, pap smears, carotid surgery to prevent strokes and among others. Rosemary Gibson is a quiet and highly effective opponent of these rampant practices that harm millions and cost billions. Her much-discussed book, “The Treatment Trap” had a significant impact in the health policy world and put the issue of overtreatment into the spotlight where it belongs.

6. Dave deBronkart

Often better known as “e-Patient Dave,” Dave deBronkart survived stage 4 kidney cancer and today is a social media superstar who speaks nationally and internationally on how patients should be treated in the U.S. health system. His compelling TEDx Talk, “Let Patients Help,” is in the top half of most-watched TED talks of all time. He tends to turn health care’s conventional wisdom on its head. “Why is it when patients do the right thing it’s called ‘compliance,’” he asks, “But when doctors do the right thing it’s called ‘quality?’”

7. David Goldhill

If you are raised to think the combination of TV and health care equals Marcus Welby, meet David Goldhill, whose day job as head of the Game Show Network (GSN) belies his other self, a controversial thought leader in health care who is getting a ton of attention. Watch for Goldhill’s book to be published in the New Year: “Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father.” Until his father’s death, Goldhill never considered why the normal market competition rules that apply in other industries don’t apply in health care. He recommends some unusual policy ideas.

8. Tom Emerick

When Tom Emerick was a global benefits executive for Wal-Mart, he discovered (with advice from Mayo Clinic and other leading medical experts) that thousands of his employees had been given transplant procedures when they didn’t need them, an unfathomable amount of suffering for people to endure. I wrote about the improvements that Tom made in a previous post, but it’s worth calling out again – Tom is a leading crusader for employers to protect the American public from unnecessary and dangerous procedures. There is no disagreement in the medical community that such harm exists; a recent consensus report from the Institute of Medicine found that one third or more of health services are wasteful. Tom helps employers address this issue.

9. David Knowlton

David Knowlton is a highly influential behind-the-scenes guy in New Jersey, who is a maverick in the best sense of the word,  and has gained national attention as a result. He’s a leading advocate for transparency, safety and quality and has been awarded numerous national appointments in recognition of the respect he’s earned in his home state and the value of his ideas — and his ability to turn them into policies. For instance, he’s the co-chair of The Leapfrog Group’s Hospital Safety Score Committee. In addition to being a key influencer behind significant New Jersey legislation on quality and transparency over the years, he’s been unafraid to do what was right. He published prices of common hospital services long before anyone else in the country was doing so, and he did a survey of New Jersey nurses to get their reputational ratings of hospitals. Keep an eye out; he has plans for 2013.

10. Maureen Corry

Maternity care in the U.S. has serious problems, including a rapid growth in the rate of Cesarean sections, now comprising more than 30 percent of all births in the U.S. Procedures that are known to be unnecessary or even harmful – like scheduled deliveries prior to 40 weeks gestation – remain

common in American hospitals. Maureen Corry and her 94 year old organization, Childbirth Connection, bring together researchers, clinicians and patients to come up with solutions. Maureen is a strong policy advocate, but also a thoughtful and purposeful researcher who brings all sides together in very constructive ways, which is why many of the issues she has raised over the years are now on the top of the policy agenda in Washington. Look for her report next year on mothers’ perceptions of the childbirth experience.

11. Regina Holliday

My fellow Forbes.com blogger Michael Millenson has called Regina Holliday the “Rosa Parks of health care.” A young widow with two small children, Holliday speaks eloquently of her husband’s cancer and the terrible ways the health care system added to his suffering. Her cause: all patients should have immediate access to their medical records. She wouldn’t move to the back of the bus when the hospital refused to share her husband’s records, and we shouldn’t be forced to either. This effort is getting traction, with a group of leading physicians now launching a movement called “open notes.”

12. Wendy Lynch

Wendy Lynch is a respected thought leader in the world of health benefits executives, and she’s a bit fed up. Now leading a unit of the think tank The Altarum Group, Wendy wants to see more boldness by employers in incentivizing employees to seek quality providers. Lynch and Altarum are likely to have significant impact in 2013.

13. Gary Taubes

This science journalist and author spent five years of his life plowing through every known study linking lifestyle factors to conditions like heart disease, diabetes and obesity, and he then wrote a book detailing all of it, “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health.”

The bottom line: the science doesn’t support conventional wisdom on saturated fat, diabetes, obesity, diet and exercise. With his remarkable colleague, Dr. Peter Attia, he started a new organization called Nutrition Science Institute to support more research and assure that Americans hear directly from the scientists. Given the heavy emphasis on lifestyle and wellness under Obamacare — including a provision allowing employers to incentivize employee wellness with up to 30 percent of their health insurance premium — look for Gary to help dispel some unscientific myths that undermine these programs.

So as you clink your glasses and wish your loved ones a Happy New Year, remember to look out for these trailblazers who will likely make a true impact on health care in 2013.