What’s wrong with our health care system and why can’t we see the fix? That’s what Toni Miles wants to know. Miles is a family and geriatric medicine professor. For the past five years, she has worked with area physicians to develop a 20-member practice-based research network. While investigating real clinical issues that affect the elderly, she has seen the daily circumstances under which primary care physicians operate.
What she has seen concerns her. Policies, she said, don’t reflect the realities in which primary care physicians work. And doctors are overwhelmed by policies that require them to do paperwork to the point that it often gets in the way of them taking care of patients.
Miles is taking what she knows about local primary care physicians to Washington, D.C., as one of the first fellows in the Health and Aging Policy Fellows Program. The program, supported by The Atlantic Philanthropies and administered by Columbia University, is designed to create a cadre of professional leaders to serve as positive change agents in health and aging policy.
She will spend a year of sabbatical working on Capitol Hill or in an executive branch agency to learn the circumstances under which lawmakers work, and she’ll also see success stories from other parts of North America.
Then, Miles will put together what she knows now with what she learns over the next year and come back to work locally on a project to improve health care policy in the hope of helping to fix the system’s problems.
The courage to question convention.
The passion to break new ground.
The insight to champion community.
The imagination to pursue the undiscovered.
The will to achieve greatness.
The promise of a limitless future.
The people to bring it to life.
It's Happening Here.