Healthcare Economy

The PPACA recommends a number of payment reform pilots to control rising healthcare costs and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are one of them. ACOs have two-fold objective of reducing healthcare costs by efficient care delivery and improving healthcare outcomes. An ACO will typically be a consortium of primary care physicians, specialist and one or more hospitals that take complete accountability of cost of care and clinical outcomes for their local population. ACOs will be eligible for bonuses if they meet both a quality and cost benchmark and penalties if they fail to meet the benchmark.

Continue reading "Analytics for Accountable Care Organizations" »

Posted by Seema Pandey at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continuing our journey towards understanding the various aspects of interoperability in healthcare,  this post will develop a few thoughts on the final result for the provider sector.  Essentially, the end game will be the development of processes and electronic systems to truly support REAL patient centricity, to reduce the cost of healthcare through transparency AND  to provide a platform for actually developing meaningful  tools, techniques and solutions for preventive healthcare and disease management.  Without interoperability even with a sector, leave alone cross sector, these goals would be impossible to achieve.

Continue reading "Interoperability Trends in Healthcare provider - The outcome" »

Posted by Dr. R Balaji at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hospitals are run by smart people – very smart people. We instinctively know where there problems are and essentially know how to go about fixing them. But convincing our peers and our managers (or the accountants) is a wholly different experience. Modern administrators’ desire data, admire analysis, and crave consensus. But our attempts are routinely foiled by proprietary clinical systems, disparate data standards, acute data quality problems, and poor data management processes.  Data does exist, but either we can’t get at it or people don’t believe in it.  We agonize over the lack of data to help us improve fairly basic processes: reducing patient waiting times, reducing on-hand inventory, improving compliance, improving patient satisfaction, and providing assurances that people are doing their job. For these and many other process issues, there is a way to solve the data access and data quality problem. Create your own easily accessible, error-free Data!  Please read on.

Continue reading "Error-Free Data Available! Real Performance Improvements in 90 Days!" »

Posted by Mark Brownlee at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Imagine this situation: you go to a supermarket and before you pick up anything from the shelf, the manager needs to call your bank to find out if you are eligible to buy it. Then when you reach the checkout counter, your bank has to confirm if they will allow the charge on the credit card or if you need to pay cash for a particular item and ask the supermarket to raise a invoice to them against your purchase! Imagine the number of people who would be involved in calling up the bank, responding to the questions at the bank and working on preparing the paperwork for the invoice and then adjusting it against their system. Now that you have visualized it, try to also imagine the costs involved around the same and how much you are paying for that box cereals actually went into making that box and bringing it to you at the store.

Continue reading "Interoperability - a platform to enable 21st century care" »

Posted by Anirban Majumder at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is simply amazing, how things change within a short span of time, in an industry that is traditionally considered highly static. Take the example of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

Continue reading "Enterprise Performance Management for Healthcare – Really!" »

Posted by Rajiv Sabharwal at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Organization departments have tendency work in silos and Healthcare Providers are no exception to this.  A leading insurance provider firm in USA was venturing into a new business in Canada and the IT team was busy working on the system requirements for the new business. The CIO sought this opportunity to make maximum out of the capital budget to invest in latest rules engine and custom application development. There was no consideration given to the revenue targets onto this new business or ROI on the IT system investment. Out of curiosity when I asked the CIO, his response was “ROI clouds the mind in any decision making. My priority is to ensure work for my team and have the systems in place to support business. It’s for business SMEs to extract maximum out of the system. This is what I call working in silos of departments by achieving individual department goals.

Continue reading "Enterprise Data analytics: Breaking department silos" »

Posted by Nilesh S Pai at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hospital executives must perform the complex task of keeping pace with the dynamic healthcare environment – constantly changing patient volumes, fluctuating supply costs, stringent government compliance and quality requirements, asset utilization needs, and staffing shortages. Real time actionable information at finger tips can make a difference between life and death in a Hospital scenario. The disparate silos of data across various departments are the biggest bottleneck in providing actionable information. Mergers and acquisitions add to the diversity of hospital information system (HIS) application and data sources, thereby not allowing ‘one version of truth’.

Continue reading "What bare minimum features should a Hospital BI tool provide?" »

Posted by Shobha Rao at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)