Good morning from Davos, Switzerland, where corporate and country muckety-mucks are gathered under a deep canopy of fresh snow for the annual World Economic Forum meeting. My colleague Adam Lashinsky has a really nice stage-setter in his must-read Data Sheet newsletter (here’s a link), to which I refer you all.
The overarching theme this year is on “creating a shared future in a fractured world,” and the subthemes are ones that Davos types have been homing in on for ages: sustainable development, inclusive growth, global collaboration and integration on an ever-divided planet, and making sure that millions (or even billions) of people aren’t left behind in the massive economic reorientation brought on by the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” as Davos founder Klaus Schwab calls it.
The fact that the world’s business and government leaders keep coming back to these lofty notions doesn’t make them less important. It’s easy, perhaps even too easy, to be snarky about such high-minded agendas—especially when so many of the world’s rich and powerful go back to ignoring such bullet items on the remaining 362 days of the year. But the big idea of finding common ground is indeed a worthy big idea—and it’s no less worthy being discussed in an alpine skiing village than it is anywhere else, I suppose. (Well…maybe a little.)
As for me, I’m here to moderate two panels that I’m truly excited about—the first (tomorrow morning) will dive into how we can switch our healthcare paradigm to one centered on outcomes and patient-centered value rather than on individual services (doctor’s visits, X-ray scans, blood tests, etc.), each of which is billed separately. (Faithful readers will remember I wrote about this concept here, in an essay offering a couple of healthcare predictions for the year.) Tomorrow’s group of panelists is a terrific one and I hope and suspect we’ll get pretty deep into the challenges and opportunities of this model.
The second discussion (on Wednesday) is on integrating mental healthcare into a care system that’s almost wholly focused on blood, guts, and bones, so to speak. We’ve got another fantastic group of experts for this one as well—and, yes, I think there’s a fair amount of crossover with Tuesday’s topic: a value-based healthcare system that focuses on the whole of the human condition and not just on its moving parts.
I’ll have some more Davos downloads for you tomorrow and Wednesday.
This essay appears in today’s edition of the Fortune Brainstorm Health Daily. Get it delivered straight to your inbox.
