It’s time to integrate social determinants of health into healthcare Today, I read a press release from a new company called Circulation, which is partnering with ride service Uber to deliver rides to medical appointments. According to the company, each year about 3.6 million patients across the U.S. — including 1 million children — miss […]
The transformative power of ‘maybe’ in healthcare Few industries are more dysfunctional and deviled by complexity than healthcare. While banks learned to share data well enough to make international ATM networks possible decades ago, patient data sharing is still crude, with doctors and hospitals using technologies that are barely on speaking terms. Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers […]
A far better way to measure hospital patient satisfaction Not long ago, I spent a few days as a hospital inpatient. At the end of my stay, during the discharge process, a nurse handed me a patient satisfaction survey form and asked me to fill it out. I gave the unit a mixed review as, […]
Hospital policies make it tougher to get high-quality inpatient mental health Like many Americans, I have a family member with a major mental illness who sometimes needs inpatient hospital care. Because I have been a healthcare researcher and journalist for 25 years, I’m particularly well prepared to help him navigate the system and get him […]
What if a surgeon had complications or deaths in five out of the ten times she operated? Sounds like she’s a dangerous hack, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not. “What if that surgeon only saw the sickest patients, and the five that did well would be dead or dying without her skills?” I asked her. “Wouldn’t you rather see her than someone who can only handle easy cases?”
The more I learned about hospitals, the more I was awed by the astonishing ballet bringing personalities, training, technologies, infrastructure and finance coming together into patient-by-patient care.
The truth is, no one relies more than pharmas on a network of intermediaries to keep profits high. And digital health technologies are poised to be powerful disintermediators.
Creating a “chief mobile healthcare officer” slot is as important to the future of healthcare delivery as chief medical information officers are to today’s digital healthcare. In fact, I’d argue that healthcare organizations that don’t do this may lose the battle to transform, disrupt and right-size care over the next five to 10 years.
Digital health technologies are growing to be much cheaper and simpler, so much so that we’re almost smothered in innovations leveraging cheap, ubiquitous wireless and broadband Internet connections.
As providers pick up value-based contracts from payers, and desperately need decent data sharing to coordinate care, I can only imagine that they’ll turn to familiar names to help them make that transition. Data connectivity based on regions will die out, but vendor solutions that support ACOs and population health analytics will soar.