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With nearly 30 years’ experience, medical consultant and healthcare keynote speaker Joe Flower has emerged as the premier observer and thought leader on the deep forces changing healthcare in the United States and around the world.

He has explored the future of healthcare with clients ranging from the World Health Organization, the Global Business Network, and the U.K. National Health Service, to the majority of state hospital associations in the U.S. as well as many of the provincial associations and ministries in Canada, and an extraordinary variety of other players across healthcare - professional associations, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, health plans, physician groups, and numerous hospitals. He has worked on change and the future with the U.S. Department of Defense, Airbus and ArianeSpace, and a number of governments in China. (See a more extensive client list)

Flower is the author of hundreds of articles. For over 20 years he was a contributing editor and regular columnist at the Healthcare Forum Journal. When the Healthcare Forum became the Health Forum of the American Hospital Association, he went on to a regular column in Hospitals and Health Networks Online. For 12 years he has written a regular column for Physician Executive, the Journal of the American College of Physician Executives. He is the author, as well, of a number of seminal articles of the Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities movement.

Flower was a contributing writer for Wired Magazine in its explosive early years, and a columnist for the pioneering health websites DNA.com and HealthCentral.com.

His deep research into the nature of change in organizations and people led to interviews with the top thinkers on organizational change, from Peter Drucker to Peter Senge and Ari de Geus. He went deeper, into the study of chaos theory, Eastern thought, and martial arts, eventually earning a black belt in Ueshiba Aikido.

Flower was a founding member of the International Health Futures Network and the principal author of the landmark forecast, “Technological Advances and the Next 50 Years of Cardiology,” Journal of the American College of Cardiology (vol. 35, no. 4, 2000).

Healthcare Better Faster Cheaper

A stunning presentation of the scope of the healthcare problem today and some remarkable news from a futurist who knows where to look: A movement is emerging that can change healthcare from the bottom up based on a new concept of value, new methods of discovering what works and what doesn’t, and new ways of building organizations that learn. While many are waiting for someone else to make the decision, now, in every part of healthcare, there are clinicians, hospitals, health plans, vendors, investors, and consumers who are taking steps to build a healthcare that works.

The Next Healthcare

In 20 years healthcare may look very little like it does today. We can already see some of the building blocks of that future - from digitization, automation, and the Internet, to powerful new pharmaceuticals and diagnostic techniques, to the increasing failure of our current financing structures - and we can begin to imagine what kind of future they will likely shape. Take a tour of a day in the life of healthcare 5, 10, or 15 years from today.
Borrow My Eyes: Consumer Power In the Future of Healthcare

What does this Information Age bring us? Well, right now, mostly disruption. More people have more information about what’s going on than ever before. But do they understand it? New data-mining techniques, the “semantic web” and consumer-directed health plans are already ushering in an age of transparency and consumer power unlike anything we have experienced before. Whoever can turn all that data into real knowledge will have leverage in the new healthcare. And that may be the best thing that could happen.

But What About Me?

As healthcare rights itself the workforce will change along with it. Most organizations are paralyzed at the prospect of job loss, but we can’t plan a new healthcare without confronting obsolescence along with the new opportunities. Healthcare will change, but the boundaries around healthcare will shift, too, enlarging the market and the potential for new business models and career paths. In this talk Joe conducts thought experiments designed for and with your organization and your people: How do we imagine our way into the new forms of healthcare? Where will we find new profit centers that can support a new workforce? How might the pieces fit together? Who can we be?
Vectors in the Future of the Healthcare Value Chain

In a healthcare world that is both consumer-driven and data-driven, healthcare’s “value chain” will be torn apart and re-assembled in a thousand large and small ways. The new value chain will have to build around highest value - not around reimbursement amount - and how that value is defined. Healthcare will live and die by value like any other industry that is subject to true market pressures. A vector is really just a way of focusing on a dimension and its direction and velocity. Vectors might include the aging of the population, new technologies, changes and opportunities in the workforce, Value Based System Design, the evolution of insurance companies and plans, and behavioral health in the new era. Discuss with Joe which vectors best capture the trends of change for your organization. How will those vectors influence the new values and be influenced by them?
ReTooling The Mind of the Organization

Joe Flower speaking Here are key skills your organization needs to become a nimble, adaptive organism. Joe makes tools of the buzzwords: he demonstrates how to plan with scenarios and how to develop what some call the “long conversation.” He gives vivid form to those vague-sounding concepts, such as knowledge management, competency transfer, sense-making, and “lean management,” , getting you the tools you actually do need to solve the core problems so difficult for organizations to wrap their collective minds around. System problems can be hard to grasp, but Joe can explain them and make meaning of the jargon. Formats include a keynote for an overview or a half-day or longer workshop. Interested in a workshop with Joe Flower?

Choose a topic from the list below, or contact us to work with Joe Flower on customizing a topic for your unique audience needs.

Joe Flower will work with you to customize a workshop out of mutliple elements, such as:

• Pre-interviews: To set up your organization's issues and situation.
• Briefing books: Fact and concept briefs to set out the core issues and concerns.
• Concrete goals: He helps you set goals and refine the process.
• The talk: Flower’s challenging and spellbinding presentation sets up the tectonic plates underlying change in healthcare, in your segment and your market.
• The Futures Game surfaces the conflcting emotions every organization has toward change, and uses them to push the group to its most creative and functional level.
• The Mindstorm quick-captures the ideas, proposals, objections, and concerns sparked by the talk.
• The Tools Teach-in gives concrete instruction in such specific change-management tools as knowledge management, sense-making, and competency transfer.
• Nailing it down: Flower drives the group process toward the client's specific desired outcomes - a strategic plan, a task force, a set of goals and metrics - whatever works for this organization.

His other writings include:

• China’s Futures Global Business Network 2000 (co-author)
• The 21st Century Healthcare Leader Jossey-Bass 1999 (co-author)
• Japan’s Futures, Global Business Network 1998 (Executive Editor)
• Leading Change: A Key Challenge for Board-Management Teams, The Governance Institute, 1998
• The Encyclopedia of the Future MacMillan, 1996 (co-author)
• Best Practices in Collaboration to Improve Health: Creating Community Jazz, (principal co-author), The Healthcare Forum and the California Wellness Foundation, 1996
• Prince of the Magic Kingdom: Michael Eisner and the Re-Making of Disney John Wiley 1991
• Age Wave Random House 1989 (co-author)

(See a more extensive list of Joe Flower’s publications)