I'm optimistic.

I spent Tuesday night with a very distinguished group of high profile people involved in various aspects of healthcare at the Healthspottr dinner to coincide with the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. It was a discussion amongst the 20 or so people about “payment reform.”

There was a ton of bickering, ideas galore, and solutions that worked for one of the four groups of healthcare (patients, doctors, insurance companies, sickcare delivery networks), but surely not for everybody.

There were talks of bundling, high deductibles for all, and blah, blah, blah and even more blah.

At the end, we all got 2 minutes to say what we got out of the discussion.

Here’s mine:

Fixing healthcare is like asking the government to create a company that solves every problem for everybody. Healthcare will not be solved from the top down. Peripheral players with classic disruptive innovation will join forces along a shared ideology to fix healthcare from the bottom up by creating a highly networked, transparent, decentralized, and consumer-centric alternate healthcare System. Over time, the better experience, the higher quality care, and the effectiveness of this System will replace the current misaligned mess.

My duty as an innovator is two-fold:

1. Obsessively focus on creating a kick ass solution for a small segment of the population who want Hello Health. We can’t try to solve the entire problem. We must know who our customers are and who they aren’t. And we must deal with those who don’t understand and criticize us for ignoring the poor or the old, the offline, etc…and all the other things we fully already realize. But we can contribute to laying the foundation for something better with the ultimate goal that our efforts will gradually expand to all those people we’re currently ignoring.

2. Obsessively explore, meet, and align ourselves with all of the other peripheral players who share our common goals of focused solutions for delivering and paying for healthcare in a decentralized, networked, aligned system that delivers healthcare, not sickcare, to true consumers. There are some fascinating, smart people out there creating elegant solutions for various aspects of the healthcare problem, including how healthcare is paid for. We all know we can’t do this on our own and there is such a passionate drive to work together because we all got into this out of frustration and anger that people are suffering under this healthcare industry and it’s simply not right.

I am ridiculously optimistic given the remarkably intelligent and driven people I’m connecting with on a daily basis who are building this soon to be incredible solution out on the periphery. There’s a ton of awesome stuff we’re doing in the background with Hello Health and we have the funding, the passion, the talent, and the connections to truly serve as a magnet for an honest, high quality, affordable healthcare solution Washington will never create.

I’m honored to be a part of this and I can’t wait to see the future.