It's a perfect storm of challenges in the healthcare space today. New technologies, new federal mandates and an aging Baby Boomer population is forcing the industry to evaluate how they deliver care to their patients from the ground-up. Technology is a major theme in this transformation. What once was the provenance of back-office wonks is now front-and-center in physicians and hospital administrators' daily lives. Aspen Advisors' Principal Dan Coate shed some light on what clients are facing, and how they're helping them navigate these choppy waters.
Consulting: What are some of the biggest challenges healthcare providers are facing?
Coate: What we find with our hospital clients is they're all looking at the impending Affordable Care Act legislation, particularly some of the elements that are going to be enacted late in 2013-2014 all around cuts in reimbursement as well as health plans coming up with exchanges for the uninsured to sign up for insurance. What we're also seeing in the legislation is an act called Meaningful Use, which incents providers to implement electronic health record technology. Right now we are in the carrot of that act, which means health providers are given money for meaningful use of electronic technologies. In a couple years we'll shift to the stick, where they will start receiving penalties on their Medicare dollars if they're not using the technology. That's driving a lot of our business. Finally I would say there is a shift in coding standards from ICD-9 to ICD-10, the International Classification of Diseases, it's a whole new coding standard that hospitals and health plans must comply to by October 2014, which means major overhauls of not only their technologies but also the education to physicians and other providers as well as their overall processes. The role we play while everything we do is technology-oriented, we largely focus on the people and the processes required to make those technologies successful. In the advisory place where we play, it's helping them look not only at technology solutions, but particularly how are those solutions going to be used, what will be the impact on the workflow, the people and therefore what types of leadership change management that's required to help get their staff from Point A to Point B.
Consulting: Are you finding clients are resisting implementing EHR?
Coate: We've seen a shift over the last five or six years from technology moving from the back-office and relegated to lower-level staff use to physicians, higher level administrators and other providers who are realizing that this technology is integral to everything they're doing.
Consulting: What pushed its acceptance over the edge?
Coate: I see it as around incentive structures. Physicians and other providers in the past have been driven much more by volume-based care, so the more care they provide, the more they are reimbursed. That was the basic shift. Today in a hospital it's frankly a mix of patients who are volume-based and you have others who are value-based, for whom providers are better reimbursed for delivering essentially more effective care you can provide in lower acuity settings, perhaps in an outpatient setting or in a home. The bottom line I think is overall is really that mega shift from volume-based care to value-based care that's really driving a lot of the adoption.
Consulting: Are you hearing a lot of doom and gloom about the Affordable Care Act from providers?
Coate: We saw in the middle of last year when the Supreme Court upheld the Act. Up until the election we frankly saw a lot of wait-and-see from our clients where they were sitting on the sidelines saying let's see what happens in November. After the election we've seen much more of an acceptance that this is the new reality and will be for the foreseeable future.
Consulting: What are some of the other technology components in this shift?
Coate: One big trend that is not endemic to healthcare is harnessing the power of Big Data and analytics. Healthcare is maybe about 5 years behind other industries, so it's playing catch-up in that area but it's becoming more and more important. Other trends we see are enabling what we've referred to as "enabling the connected community". That is, as healthcare organizations shift from being less about the four walls of a hospital and more about keeping a population as healthy as possible and out of the hospital as much as possible. We're seeing much more telemedicine impact, giving patients access to their own medical records, being able to provide patients with remote monitoring solutions perhaps on a smartphone, where hospitals and providers can really keep track of their patients and know how they're doing without having to bring them in for specific visits.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.