With belugas silently gliding by as a backdrop, panelists and guest speakers at the annual Health Connect South conference Thursday kept coming back to one theme: collaboration.
From pediatric cancer to investment trends, genomics to rural hospitals, healthcare officials from across the spectrum gathered at the Georgia Aquarium to agree that regional health collaboration – in this case the Southeast – is going to be key for an ever-evolving industry facing new challenges as it heads into the 2020’s and beyond.
Gary Reedy, CEO of the American Cancer Society, told the audience about how pediatric cancer has seen its death rate decline by 2/3 since 1971. With more than 12,000 individual childhood cancer organizations nationwide, collaboration is difficult but necessary in a field where clinical trials and securing research funding carry weighty consequences.
Matt Reed, president and CEO of Georgia CEO, helmed a panel on collaboration and partnership success. In it he discussed how the healthcare field is so broad and so complex that collaboration has become not just a luxury, but a necessity. While medicine may at its core be personal, healthcare has become regional, national, and even global.
But as the suits in Washington continue to battle over insurance premiums and universal healthcare, here in Georgia many rural residents still struggle to receive treatment.
“Georgians’ health should not be determined by their zip code” exclaimed Jean Rawlings Sumner, Dean of the Mercer School of Medicine in a panel on rural healthcare. With 109 rural Georgia counties struggling to provide adequate services, it requires innovation and investment on a state and local level to make sure Peach State residents not living in cities get the care they need.
Whether it’s improving healthcare literacy, (only 1/10 Americans are proficient in the subject claimed Lauren R. Gilbert, also of Mercer) or utilizing Area Health Education Centers (AHECs) to educate and direct new medical professionals to small towns, Georgia officials must think outside the box to find new ways to confront an issue that has been front and center at the State Capitol in recent legislative sessions.
Part of that push was the creation of the Georgia Rural Health Innovation Center at Mercer, created via grant funding allocated in 2018. Less than a year old, the center seeks to serve as a database for those working on rural healthcare issues. With access to fewer resources than their big city peers, collaboration becomes even more important for rural health providers, and the Rural Health Innovation Center provides a central meeting point for medical professionals across the state.
