Touré McCluskey is the founder of OkCopay, a search engine for medical procedures whose mission is to provide consumers with objective information so they can make better choices about their health care. He is also a PopTech Social Innovation Fellow, a program that Pioneer co-sponsored. Touré’s opinions are not necessarily those of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

When you want to buy something at the store, you check the price tag. Why can’t it be this easy to figure out the cost of medical care?

It should be.

Consider, for a moment, the story of Tracy, an uninsured waitress trying to find out how much a dental procedure would cost before making an appointment. Calling providers didn’t help her, because they themselves didn’t know the prices; dealing with multiple insurance companies often makes it difficult for providers to know how much a procedure will actually cost a patient. As a result, Tracy was left with a surprisingly high bill she did not expect—and could not afford.

This blog entry was originally posted to the Association of American Medical College's AAMC Reporter blog.

Academic medical centers are, by definition, hubs for education, research, and patient care. They are essential to creating a health care system in which new knowledge is translated into practice for real-time treatment and quality improvement.

Academic medical centers should be centers of lifelong medical learning and knowledge sharing, where medical professionals expand their expertise and competencies throughout their careers and where best practices are disseminated to the field. They can serve as forums for ongoing mentoring and case-based training. They can host expanded practice communities, where professionals from multiple disciplines, specialties, and even locales work together to provide better care to more people.

Originally posted on the Wing of Zock, an AAMC-powered blog for conversation and new thinking about health care through the lens of academic medicine.

Knowledge and expertise are at the center of medical care — without them, we are working in the dark. Fortunately, there is plenty of knowledge to be had: More medical knowledge has been created in the past one hundred years than in the previous five thousand, and more knowledge will be created in the next 50 years than ever before. Yet we have a serious shortage of expertise, in the form of access to clinicians with the latest knowledge and best practices, especially for the care of underserved populations.

Why? This explosion in medical knowledge has not yet been accompanied by a similar transformation in our approach to medical education. In short, we’re not able to keep up.

“You need a logarithmic methodology to expand capacity to match the logarithmic increase in knowledge that is occurring worldwide.”

That’s how Dr. Sanjeev Arora described the force multiplication theory at the core of Project ECHO during last week’s launch of the ECHO model throughout the VA. It’s also a call to action for how we approach medical training and health care delivery.

Knowledge is power, yes, but in health care, knowledge is life-saving. Knowledge is more pain-free hours in the day. Knowledge is quality of life.

We need to think differently about how we share knowledge.

Let’s allow Dr. Arora to walk us through the math:

"More knowledge has been created in the last 100 years than was created in the last 5,000. And more knowledge will be created in the next 50 years than has ever occurred before. So what this leads to is a very complex issue—you have an explosion of best practices and how do you take these best practices to affect underserved populations that may be living all over the world? As a result of this knowledge explosion, what is happening is there is a shortage of highly specialized expertise all over the world, not just rural areas; even urban underserved areas experience this shortage."

Innovation – the process of applying new thinking to old problems – is critical to improving our health care system.

On May 8, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced its first round of Health Care Innovation Award grants to 26 organizations nationwide, including two groundbreaking initiatives that have been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Together, Project ECHO and the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers funded through Cooper University Hospital will receive three-year HHS grants totaling more than $11 million to amplify their efforts to improve both the quality and affordability of health care.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius noted that the awards will “provide our most creative minds … with the backing they need to build the strong, effective, affordable health care system of the future.”

In the case of both Project ECHO and the Camden Coalition, these words could not be truer.