Healthcare Economy

Better care for individuals is one of the important goals for the ACOs in the Shared Savings Program as established by the Affordable Care Act. This highest-level goal also known as the three-part aim consists of the following:
•Better care for individuals - As described in the Institute of Medicine report, it has six dimensions of quality: Safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency and equity
•Better health for populations with respect to educating beneficiaries about the upstream causes of ill health
•Lower the expenditures by eliminating waste and inefficiencies while not withholding any needed care that helps beneficiaries

Continue reading "Scope for leveraging IT in establishing patient centred care in an ACO" »

Posted by Radhabaran Mohanty at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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)

ARRA Meaningful Use (MU) mandates have put a transformation pressure on the entire US healthcare ecosystem and is pushing  the use of electronic health records (EHRs) across all provider settings.
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) has authorized incentive payments through Medicare and Medicaid to clinicians and hospitals when they use EHRs privately and securely to achieve specified improvements in care delivery. Also HITECH  goal is not adoption alone but using  EHRs in a meaningful way by the providers  to achieve significant improvements in care.

Continue reading "Meaningful Use : A journey towards Healthcare Enterprise Performance Management" »

Posted by Shishir Kumar at 5:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are two distinct aspects of change management that I advocate in the context of Meaningful Use. One is related to end user training and sustained adoption of healthcare IT which I have discussed in one of my earlier blogs. The other is organizational change management to promote high performance culture which I will discuss here.

Continue reading "Meaningful Use can trigger high-performance culture" »

Posted by Seema Pandey at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's now time for the hospitals and physicians to chalk out the roadmap for embracing the meaningful use and set the ball rolling for transforming the way IT is leveraged in healthcare.  I would like to highlight 3 key points in this blog -  Need for a long term strategic approach, Effective change management and leveraging HPM.

Continue reading "Leveraging "meaningful use" thrust for sustained improvement " »

Posted by Jayanta Ghosh at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The need to take a serious look at backend operations of the providers to explore opportunities for optimization and cost savings was emphasized in my last blog. Supply Chain Management is one of the areas that have significant room for improvements and most industry thought leaders concur on this point. This is also evident from the published data points regarding provider supply chain management.

Continue reading "Provider supply chain optimization to improve cash flow" »

Posted by Seema Pandey at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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)

Over the past decade, hospitals have invested their resources in automation of both the clinical and non-clinical processes. The current economic situation will force hospitals to be more cost-efficient and improve operations. Hospital leaders may be restricted to new investments in information technology and will be mandated to reap benefits from current investments. Collaborating Supply Chain and Revenue Cycle functions provide single point of visibility of key metrics for hospital leadership, which will enable efficient real-time decision making; and improve hospital-wide performance.

Continue reading "Collaborative Performance : Making supply chain costs an hospital-wide responsibility" »

Posted by Venu Tirumala at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)