Healthcare Reform is Just a First Step. Total Transformation Adds Up to 'Billions of Dollars of Opportunity'
In the healthcare industry, one plus one equals three—or four; no, maybe it's five.
The U.S. healthcare industry's unique business model hasn't really added up for a long time.
Just ask the American public, which recently ingested an intensive, 18-month-long dose of dysfunctional healthcare politics. Complexity and uncertainly also plagues healthcare insiders, which explains why companies in the industry are turning to consultants to help make sense of historic, recently enacted but not yet spelled-out legislative and regulatory changes while contending with several pre-existing conditions that qualify as chronic, if not quite terminal.
"The world got turned upside down on March 23," notes Deloitte Health Reform Practice leader Bill Copeland of the sweeping Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The reform followed on the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) with its curious funding arrangement for electronic medical records (EMR) adoption (and "meaningful use") as well as the U.S. healthcare system's move to International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition (ICD-10), which has been described as "Y2K plus HIPPA" in terms of its overall potential impact.
Despite this upending of the status quo, Copeland and other healthcare consulting leaders stress that we haven't seen anything yet. While PPACA may have address access issues, endemic cost and quality challenges remain. "The reform act certain is an industry-shaping event," allows Mark Knickrehm, global managing director of Accenture's health
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