Healthcare reform will only be successful if the nation’s physicians change the way they practice medicine.

That’s the argument being put forth by Eric Dishman, director of health innovation and policy for Intel’s Digital Health Group. A popular feature on the healthcare IT speaker circuit, Dishman presented the Tuesday morning keynote speech to a packed audience at the Medical Group Management Association’s 2011 annual conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

His message? America has developed a “very specialty-driven paradigm of care” that emphasizes centralized healthcare instead of distributed care. And that, combined with the current standard of fee-for-service payment, is destroying the American healthcare system.

“Business as usual – practice as usual – is not sustainable and not scalable,” he said.

Dishman, who has worked for years on developing alternative models of care, said the nation’s healthcare system needs to move away from a reliance on hospitals and clinics and toward home-based, mobile care delivery that helps patients and doctors wherever they are. He pointed out that when Intel was studying physicians’ habits to develop a new electronic health record product, “none of the physicians we studied was ever in their office.”

Aside from what he called the “mainframe problem” of centralized care, Dishman said the nation’s healthcare system needs to focus on moving to a fee-for-outcomes-based payment system. In that sense, he said, the federal government should stop targeting hospital readmissions as a quality measure and focus instead on reducing hospital admissions or emphasizing hospital avoidance.

“We have to start possibilizing other models of care,” he said.

Dishman said physicians need to embrace mobile technology as a means of delivering care more quickly to the patient, with better outcomes and care continuity in mind. They have to acquaint themselves with the new tools of the trade that enable them to communicate with patients at any time and place, and to coordinate care – including wellness – with other members of the care team.

“The next-generation pacemakers are going to be sending 24-hour a day physiological data, and are your systems and people ready for that?” he asked.

Finally, Dishman also brought up what he called “the other inconvenient truth” – global aging. As the world’s population grows, gets older and wants to stay in their homes longer, the healthcare challenges will grow, but the world’s supply of healthcare providers won’t.

Building a team-based care system, he said, will move the nation in the right direction.

“Nobody is happy with the status quo,” he pointed out. “So why are we fighting so hard to maintain it?”