LAS VEGAS – Fred Rachman, MD, CEO of the Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services, prompted the group of physicians and technologists in the room to start thinking about what a successful healthcare system might look like. That was his role Tuesday at a session called “Realizing the Value of Investments Resulting in Health Care Reform: Or Can We?”

New at HIMSS12, the session was one of nine and a VIP breakfast that stem from the new HIMSS Leaders & Innovators program, a year-round initiative of events, community, networking, and research.

The gathering – by invitation only – looked and sounded like the large brainstorming session it was meant to be. Rachman’s role was to get the creative juices flowing, and he did, spurring wide-ranging comments about the state of the U.S. healthcare system.

Rachman had declared at the start. “We’re coming from not such a happy place.” The U.S. leads in technology, yet, at $2.6 trillion a year spent on healthcare, it is “at the top of the cost pack.”

“We are clearly in the midst of change,” Rachman told the audience. He noted increasing demand for transparency and diminishing support for individual provider control.”

To bring the point of change home, he showed a slide of a six-inch paper chart – in all it formidability.

“We need a huge disruptive force in how we practice medicine,” said one physician, who cited the increasing challenge of preventing and treating chronic disease. She preceded her comment by saying when she finished her residency, “I thought I was smarter than I had ever been.”

Physicians have become “so much more entrepreneurial than professional,” another physician noted. Patients who are indigent have very little hope, he said, and “until healthcare can find a way to let them know that we care about them, they are part and parcel of the problem.”

There were comments offered on reducing waste as a means to cut costs. An attendee asked: “Is anyone measuring?”

“Yes,” responded another. “But, it’s not w-a-s-t-e, it’s w-a-i-s-t.” We eat poorly; we don’t exercise.”

The talk turned to drugs. There’s a pill for everything, said one physician, who suggested correlating the cost of the healthcare system with the dispensation of drugs. “It’s all about drugs, drugs, drugs,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

“Population health and healthcare, lifestyle behavior, those are things other countries do better,” commented another attendee.

Rachman rallied the group to think about solutions. There was no resolution. It was just an hour-long session, barely enough to get the creative juices going.