Nancy Ridenour said the U.S. health care system needs to shape up.
Ridenour, who was appointed dean of the College of Nursing this year, said the system fails to treat patients with chronic diseases and share patients' medical records with providers. She said it could improve by more effectively translating health care research into policy.
Ridenour will host a lecture, "Translating Research to Health Policy: Challenges and Opportunities," on Thursday at 12:30 p.m. in the Domenici Center, Room 3010.
Prior to coming to UNM in 2008, Ridenour worked on Medicare legislation in Washington.
She said the Health Policy Center at UNM was a big reason she came to the University.
"UNM has a real opportunity to be a leader in health policy," she said. "Nurses in particular have a lot of solutions to the health care problems in this country, but we often don't get those solutions to the right people, which are the policy makers."
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Ridenour said she plans to change the nursing program at UNM by encouraging students to share potential solutions to health care problems with policy makers when they begin their careers.
"Researchers don't know how to talk to policy makers, and vice versa," she said. "I plan to work with the UNM research community in order to find better ways to impact policy."
Sophomore nursing student Tiffany Lowenstein said money is the main reason translating research into health policy is so difficult.
"Money needs to go to the patients first, and to research and its translation second," she said. "Unless there is a huge sum of money put into health care, the problem is never going to be solved."
Ridenour said it is important to try to impact policies now while the U.S. is in a time of significant health care reform.
"There is something in the United States' health care system that is not working to our best advantage," she said. "We are spending more money than other countries and getting less positive outcome."
Ridenour said President Obama's nine-point plan to reform the health care system could bring about the improvements she's looking for but that the details still need to be worked out.
The plan proposes a nationalized health care system, which would provide health insurance and pharmaceuticals to more Americans at a lower price.
Lowenstein said she opposes a nationalized system.
"I think it is just about the worst thing we could do," she said. "At that point, you're making people work for the government and not for their salaries."
Ridenour also worked on the Health Information Technology portion of Obama's stimulus bill. HIT would invest in systems that would store medical records on electronic databases.
Medical records, in most cases, are still stored on paper, Ridenour said.
"Unless you have a good health information system that can share lab results and exam results, there are a lot of things that fall through the cracks, and there are a lot of duplicated tests," she said. "That
happens in our system to the tune of several hundred billion dollars of waste."
Ridenour said a good health information system would also improve treatment for patients with chronic ailments.
"The way that the system is set up, we are really good at dealing with acute problems," she said. "But we're not so good at dealing with people who have ongoing health-related issues, and we need to get better at prevention as well."
Ridenour said the United States needs to reconsider the health care system in place and work to improve it.
"What we are doing right now is not sustainable," Ridenour said. "Clearly there is a lot about the system that needs to be changed."
'Translating Research to Health Policy: Challenges and Opportunities'
Thursday, 12:30-2 p.m.
Domenici Center, Room 3010
