NASHVILLE –  Throughout his career – as a pediatrician, Harvard professor and now CMS administrator – Donald Berwick has been a fan of quality guru W. Edwards Deming.

Berwick spoke about Deming and quality management in his remarks to the Nashville Health Care Council on Sept. 14, hosted by former U.S. Senator Bill Frist, MD.

“One of the key tenets in Deming’s approach to quality was that ‘doing it right is less expensive than doing it wrong’,” said Berwick. “And doing it right in healthcare requires agility, customer focus and authentic partnership.”

Berwick noted that CMS is working closely with the Justice Department and other agencies to modernize systems for tracking fraud and abuse. “One of the biggest surprises when I took this job was that there’s a ton more fraud and abuse than I thought. In the past, that meant that CMS had to wield a big hammer and create more regulations. But now we’re using sophisticated predictive modeling and other technology tools. These IT tools help us prevent fraud and abuse without requiring more across-the-board regulations.”

In Berwick’s view, IT is already playing an indispensable role in creating state insurance exchanges in advance of 2014. “Ideally, there should be no ‘wrong door’ to enter the healthcare system,” he said. “We’re having 50 conversations with 50 states, and we’re providing a wide range of options so they can customize each exchange as they see fit. It’s a huge IT challenge.”

“In this country, we’ve rarely looked at healthcare as a patient journey, where there’s a narrative uniting primary care, specialists, hospitals and home health,” added Berwick. “If we implement the quality systems that other industries have used, we can focus on the big picture and innovate our way to affordability.”