#MY ATRIUS HEALTH FOR FREE#

In this classic Little Golden Book from 1945, Tootle is a young locomotive who loves to chase butterflies through the meadow. The only example I know of a train getting off the tracks and then back on again is from a little Golden Book about “Tootle,” a nonconformist little train that hopped the tracks to chase butterflies. To really torture the metaphor, many healthcare organizations and practices that were attracted to the Triple Aim have had trouble “staying on track.” Once a train or an organization gets off the track it is very hard to get back on track. Many of us have been traveling those tracks since the launch of the Triple Aim in 2007-2008. To stretch a metaphor, the ACO movement and the ACA that was designed to support it are like tracks that have been laid by the evolving experience of forward thinking providers of care like Kaiser and organizations like the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) launched by Don Berwick and others in 1991. The ACA was an attempt to extend those benefits to everyone.Ī train can’t go where there is no track, and progress requires a goal before the tracks to the goal can be laid. Collectively we’ve invested in basic medical research, new life saving technologies, and more effect medical treatments. Until recently most of us have been on a better train than the one our ancestors rode. I hope to ride the train until I reach three digits. I have been on anti-hypertensive meds since my late teens, always exercised, never smoked, and have taken statins for over twenty years. Mother made it to 93 with the aid of forty years of antihypertensives, a quarter century of cholesterol management, an LAD angioplasty, and a pacemaker. Uncle Jim made it to 76 with two CABGs and an early version implanted defibrillator. My uncle and my mother both got genes from Papa Childs. I got on the train in the late sixties and my first thought was how much further Papa Childs might have been able to ride if he had been offered the same options that I was offering to my patients. The “medical train” my grandfather rode in 1953 was not very fancy compared to the ride we offer cardiac patients now. My guess is that the pipe, his love of steak and eggs, and his genes were too much of a counter balance. He did at least 10,000 steps each day walking to the station in the morning, home for lunch, and then back to the station and home again in the evening. Unfortunately, my grandfather’s constant pipe smoking and his genes felled him with a huge myocardial infarction at the age of 64. He even rode the train to see me in Oklahoma.

#MY ATRIUS HEALTH FOR FREE#

He could ride the train anywhere he wanted to go for free and take anyone he wanted along for free also. I always thought that my grandfather was a very important man. He would then announce with great pomp and circumstance just how much weight I had gained since my last visit. I would climb up on the scale and “Papa Childs” would exchange the circular heavy weights on the arm until just the right balance was found. The big event of the trip was to climb the big wooden stairs to the loading dock where there was a huge scale with a long arm where various counterweights dangled. He never owned a car so it meant that we would walk. Some of my earliest memories are of going down to the train station with him when we would visit the little town in North Carolina where I have had family for over 200 hundred years. Perhaps it is because my maternal grandfather worked all of his life for the Seaboard Railroad.

My atrius health