Joe Flower
Healthcare Futurist
Topic Categories:
Inspiring futurist and provocative thought-leader for 30 years on building better, faster, cheaper healthcare.
*Fee ranges are presented as a guideline only. Speaker fees are subject to change without notice. For an exact quote, please contact your Speaker Exchange Agency representative.
With over 37 years’ experience, Joe Flower has emerged as a thought leader on the deep forces changing healthcare in the United States and around the world. He has spoken to or consulted with hundreds of clients ranging from the World Health Organization, the Global Business Network, the U.K. National Health Service, the U.S. Department of Defense, and Fortune 100 companies, 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 in every sector.
Flower is the author of How To Get What We Pay For: A Handbook for the Revolutionaries – Doctors, Nurses, Healthcare Leaders, Inventors, Investors, Employers, Insurers, Governments, Consumers, You. The book is a unique, comprehensive framework for understanding the systemic transformation underway in healthcare and a manual for how to make intelligent and strategic choices for oneself and for one’s organization.
Underpinning much of Flower’s writing is his extensive research into leadership and the change process on over 60 top thinkers on organizational change, including Peter Drucker, Peter Senge, and Ari de Geus. The project took him into the study of chaos theory, Eastern thought, and Aikido in which he eventually earned a black belt.
The office of The Change Project, Inc.
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. He was a founding member of the International Health Futures Network and the principal author of the landmark healthcare forecast, “Technological Advances and the Next 50 Years of Cardiology,” Journal of the American College of Cardiology (vol. 35, no. 4, 2000).
His other writings include:
- Healthcare Beyond Reform: Doing it Right for Half the Cost, Taylor & Francis 2012
- 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)
Flower also serves on the Board of the Center for Health Design and has worked with numerous hospitals and architectural firms as they design future healthcare environments.
Flower received his B.A. from UC Santa Barbara, and his MA in history from San Francisco State University. In his free time, he plays guitar, hosts the Writers conference on The Well, or reads until his eyes cross with fatigue.
Drawing from a Table of Elements in Healthcare
Beyond the fog, haze, and chaos of the debates of 2017 something is forming, an ecology of futures that grow from the interaction of new technologies, new pathways of care, and new economics. Flower calls these The Table of Elements of Healthcare. These deep disruptive trends will mix and re-combine to shape healthcare in ways that are more powerful and fundamental than today’s political shifts.
Picture: Blockchain and artificial intelligence meet reference pricing, personal medicine and population health. And there are others, some you may be innovating with, others you may not have considered: new patient-centered tech, DIY healthcare and the quantified self, mobile tech linked up into 24/7 distributed care, medical automation and Big Data analytics, population health management, and seamless coordination, among others. What will it look like when various elements – the new systems and new tech – recombine and actually work? What will the Next Healthcare look like, day to day, for clinicians, healthcare leaders, patients, parents, employers? In this talk, you’ll take the imaginative journey and learn a framework for choosing the elements that will get you where you want to go.
Take a sneak peek with Joe Flower, hopeful and bracing; subtle and dazzling; and visionary, yet deeply practical.
[Best for: Healthcare audiences, governments, decision-makers buying healthcare. Customizable.]
Politics and Economics, Global and National, And How to Track the Important Variables
We’re back in the cage fight. We’ve been struggling with healthcare reform and payment reform for 8 years now — and now they’re going to rip it all up and replace it with … something. The process is likely to be a lot more protracted and chaotic than anyone hopes for. And we won’t know how it really works out until well after the law is in place. We’re talking years. In the meantime, what was built under the Affordable Care Act, the sources of big chunks of our healthcare income, may or may not survive the disruption.
You must be asking:
- How do you and your organization economically and emotionally survive this period with a minimum of hair-tearing and -pulling?
- What are the best ways to secure your survivability until it all shakes out?
- Which aspects of our current reality are likely to change the least?
Here’s the kicker: The expectation of constrained resources, the chaos and uncertainty of getting to them, and the increased unwillingness of private payers to be cost-shifted into the cash cow role, will lead to a paradoxical result: much more rapid innovation in both business models and the technology that supports them as the industry reshapes to meet a radically different future. Hold onto your hats, folks.
In this talk, Joe Flower brings current events and trends to bear on your immediate situation, and offers a framework for navigating through it. He combines the art of the long view with up-to-the-moment insights into the unfolding political realities and their second- and third-order consequences.
[Best for: Healthcare audiences, governments, decision-makers buying healthcare. Customizable.]
If you are selling into healthcare internationally, or planning new initiatives in your country, you may be scratching your head. What’s the strategy now?
How will the possibility of increasing protectionism and political shifts in major healthcare markets like the U.S. affect the international healthcare market? How will they affect your projects?
No one can predict the specifics now, but there are rules of thumb, trends to watch, and sources to trust.
Drawing on 35 years of experience in healthcare, and work with many national and local governments and vendors around the world, Flower will work with your organization to devise a carefully customized talk integrating what he knows with what you know so that you’ll come away with new energy, a greater clarity, an actionable way forward.
[Best for: Governments, healthcare organizations, and vendors selling into healthcare around the world.]
It’s all happening so fast.
Sometimes events move so quickly that a talk you commissioned months before is not as satisfying as this up-to-the-moment, spontaneous conversation. Drawing on a deep knowledge of history and 35-years of experience in healthcare, Joe Flower brings thought-provoking analysis and new perspectives to your unique situation, addressing your unique concerns.
As Flower reframes issues and answers your questions, sharing the most recent information available, what you hear addresses what you most care about right now. This kind of talk has been among his most popular, partly because it’s always fresh, and allows him to delve deep where called for, and because it draws on the strengths of your group, engaging them at the live edge, where they are most curious and growing.
Flower can do a short presentation or bring seed questions to get things started, based on your requests. You and he can request questions ahead of time or screen questions as you go. This is a highly customizable talk.
[Best for: Healthcare audiences with a good grounding in the issues, but can be tailored to other audiences if prepped with the client.]
The two scenarios: old models + new tech v. new models + new tech. Let’s see where they each take us
We hear it in blog after news article after press release: This changes everything! Introducing the new technology will make healthcare so much more efficient that healthcare will become cheaper, more available, and better. All by itself!
Just as often, Joe Flower sees broad discussions of the future of healthcare that are all about the technology and ignore the economics of this vast system. Can the same old models be made to work by means of new, more efficient technology?
In this talk Flower explores the two main scenarios, Fee-for-service + tech v. business model innovation + tech. Can one or both accomplish the same goals of reducing costs, improving care, and making care affordable and accessible for all? Let’s think this through and come out with a clear, waking strategy.
[Best for: Healthcare audiences and organizations selling tech into healthcare. Customizable.]
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