Reclaiming Healthcare’s Healing Mission for a Sustainable Future

Abstract

Healthcare in the United States has reached a point where it is unsustainable for the long term, particularly for the poor, the elderly, and healthcare workers (HCWs) themselves. We propose a framework for making U.S. healthcare more sustainable, whereby the service returns to its core mission of healing. The framework casts that healing mission in broadly applicable, practical terms, whereby leaders of healthcare organizations and in the wider for-profit, not-for-profit, and governmental healthcare ecosystem take concrete steps to improve outcomes for patients and HCWs. Those steps involve aligning healthcare resources, incentives, and policies with the core mission of healing and then implementing change in specific ways that particular organizations have already shown are achievable and sustainable. We use those examples to illustrate how healing-oriented innovations in healthcare delivery get deployed and how progress toward sustainability then ensues. Lessons from these efforts can be tailored to individual healthcare contexts and institutions—and then applied on a national scale. The discussed initiatives can also guide the direction of future research on healthcare sustainability.