HAPHIE

The best part of today's DMAA Forum '09 meeting was the plenary session address by the Chair of its Board of Directors, Gordon Norman, MD. He tackled the important issue of how to combine the various interventions that are being promoted by the various stakeholder groups, including the patient centered medical home, patient monitoring technology, the electronic medical record, data exchange, physician payment reform, classic disease management, wellness, prevention and consumerism.

The Disease Management Care Blog agrees with Dr. Norman: it's no longer a matter of measuring the return on investment or the impact on quality for the still evolving iterations of each of these individual interventions, it's now a matter of figuring out how to fit these all together into a integrated whole.

He called the concept 'High quality, Affordable, Personal Health Improvement for Everyone' a.k.a. HAPHIE. His point was that we already have all the tools and all the information and all the science we need to provide mass customization for individual health care consumers. There is already plenty of money in the system to provide personalized care on a population-based scale. The challenge is to fit all the pieces together in an overlapping, mutually self-supportive and synergistic whole.