Robert Pearl, M.D. ’72, former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, Kaiser Permanente, will talk about his Yale experience, his life in medicine, and his prescription for our healthcare system when he delivers Alumni Grand Rounds on Thursday, October 26, at 5 p.m. at Yale School of Medicine. The talk will take place in the Beaumont Room (SHM L-215A), 333 Cedar Street.
As the CEO, he was responsible for the health care of 4.1 million Kaiser Permanente members in California. Pearl also served as president and CEO of the Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group with 700,000 members in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. In these roles, he led 9,000 physicians and 35,000 staff.
He is the author of “Mistreated: Why We think We’re Getting Good Healthcare—And Why We’re Usually Wrong” a Washington Post bestseller that offers a road map for transforming American healthcare. All proceeds from the book go to Doctors Without Borders.
Recently named one of Modern Healthcare’s 50 most influential physician leaders, Pearl is an advocate for the power of integrated, prepaid, technologically advanced and physician-led healthcare delivery. Pearl is on faculty at both the business and medical schools at Stanford and has taught at Duke, UC Berkeley, and Harvard.
His column on Forbes.com on the business and culture of health care includes articles such as a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, which received over 500K views. Pearl has been featured in media outlets including CNBC, CBS This Morning, Fox, ABC News, USA Today, Time, and NPR.
Board certified in plastic and reconstructive surgery, Pearl received his medical degree from Yale School of Medicine, followed by a residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford. From 2012 to 2017, Pearl served as chairman of the Council of Accountable Physician Practices, which includes the nation’s largest and best multispecialty medical groups, and participated in the Bipartisan Congressional Task Force on Delivery System Reform and Health IT in Washington.
“Mistreated” explores the problems hampering our healthcare system. Pearl says that as patients, we wrongly assume the “best” care is dependent mainly on the newest medications, the most complex treatments, and the smartest doctors. But Americans look for health-care solutions in the wrong places, he asserts. For example, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved each year if doctors reduced common errors and maximized preventive medicine.
For Pearl, these kinds of mistakes are a matter of professional importance, but also personal significance: he lost his own father due in part to poor communication and treatment planning by doctors. And consumers make costly mistakes too: we demand modern information technology from our banks, airlines, and retailers, but we passively accept last century's technology in our health care.
Solving the challenges of health care starts with understanding these problems, he maintains. “Mistreated” explains why subconscious misperceptions are so common in medicine, and shows how modifying the structure, technology, financing, and leadership of American health care could radically improve quality outcomes.
Alumni Grand Rounds is a series of talks that brings YSM alumni and students together for career-focused discussions about medicine and biomedical science. A light dinner will be served at 4:45 p.m. before the talk, which is open to the Yale community. Space is limited. Please RSVP at http://tinyurl.com/alumnigrandrounds.