A Challenge...

Tomorrow's Health Care Starts Today

Dear Colleagues:

The call to action from healthcare's biggest thinkers and brightest leaders to transform America's fragmented, disjointed and dysfunctional care systems has been heard loud and clear! Corporate America's CEOs are resolute. They expect health plans and disease management companies to work together - uniting medical and behavioral care systems. The first charge? Focus on depression care management.

We invite and challenge healthcare leaders from all sectors of the healthcare industry to join our distinguished faculty to collaborate on re-engineering how we can do a better job serving those suffering from chronic disease and depression. Our distinguished Summit Co-Chairs (Ron Kessler, PhD and Kurt Kroenke, MD), Advisory Committee, and DMAA's leadership have worked hard to develop a highly interactive leadership Summit to initiate Tomorrow's Health Care Today... We hope that you will plan to lock-in these two full days from your busy calendars -- to support this important health policy, care system redesign and disease management conference. Each full day is jam packed from 8:00 am-5:00 pm with important opportunities to learn, share, interact and contribute.

We encourage all health leaders to leave their cell phones in their hotel room [or at least off in their briefcase] and arrange to travel back home to be with family Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning June 9th -- if appropriate) and be well prepared for a thought-provoking and leadership-inspired summit experience.

As indicated below, the challenge of Co-Morbid Depression and Chronic Illness is an important one.

We look forward to your noteworthy contributions,

The challenge is before us...

"Depression is the Cancer of the 21st Century"

World Health Organization

Over 19 million Americans experience a depressive illness each year with many/most of these going undiagnosed and untreated. The tragedy of this social and economic burden [2000 estimated cost of $83.1 billion] on individuals and the healthcare system is even more unfortunate because of the fact that many of these patients have regular contact with the healthcare system.

Untreated depression for Corporate America's employers is costly at $77.6 billion. Recent studies show the economic burden breakdown for employers to include $26.1 billion for direct medical costs. In addition, depressed workers cost their employers $51.5 billion a year in lost productive time! The economic evidence is clear: employees that are NOT happy and NOT healthy -- account for $36.2 billion in absenteeism costs and another $15.3 billion in presenteeism costs, i.e., poor work performance.

The high cost of this disease is compounded by the fact that studies have shown that 25-40% of patients with a chronic disease like asthma, COPD, congestive heart disease and diabetes are clinically depressed, contributing to the difficult of managing their physical illness. The burden of depression on our society will be further exacerbated by the fact that one of the fastest growing segments of our society, our baby boomers, are more likely to suffer from depression. In a 4-year study of elderly enrollees in HMOs only 12-25% of patients with clinically significant depressive symptoms received treatment for depression. With the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug Legislation and the inclusion of disease management in the legislation provides and opportunity to bring together healthcare professionals from different sectors of our industry to more proactive address the barriers that prevent the optimizing of care for depressed patients.

The large gap between best care and usual treatment for depression and the growing recognition of disease management as a viable strategy for the treatment of chronic disease have created the impetus for the development of this 1st Annual Integrated Healthcare Leadership Summit: Co-Morbid Depression and Chronic Illness.