The Future of Healthcare

Healthcare Competition and Convenience

“You nailed it,” one physician had written. “Healthcare is changing and convenience is just one of the focused ideas for upcoming customers of medical care.” Competition is always a timely and sometimes frightening topic for physicians and marketing experts. “Change or die.” This is an excellent understanding by a marketing expert regarding the state policies of the changing medical care industry. Patients are not going to wait to see a physician. Healthcare “drive-thrus” are on the way! To succeed, physicians need to change their distribution models in the new wellness age and become more effective.

This is a good insight. However, pharmacy leaders getting into certain micro-health promotions are not actually bad. It just indicates any current physician needs to be wiser, better and more targeted from a business viewpoint. That’s not a bad thing. Having CVS or others breathe down your neck means anyone currently providing the services the drug stores want to take a share of has a nice pressured probability to evaluate what they do best, what they should spend money on, what they no more perhaps should do in a few years removed and what they can do better, quicker, more viably and more product and expertise-focused for later on in a modified atmosphere. Competition is terrifying. But competitors can shine a light and a laser focus often in discussions that otherwise might not take place.

The great news is that the focus on customer/patient of a Walgreen’s or CVS is not actually the target focus of the most effective treatment centers in the US. Not that the common affluent patient never goes to Walgreen’s or CVS, but I think it will be a while before that individual recognizes a pharmacy as a practical replacement to going to their own physician. Primary care doctors and internists who may be threatened by this should concentrate on focusing what skills they provide their sufferers as doctors, over and against the NPs who will likely be offering care in these pharmacy treatment centers.

Healthcare Innovation

Jonathan Bush, found and CEO of athenahealth talked about the limitations to medical care advancement in a vibrant discussion with MIT Technology Review Editor in Chief Jerr Pontin at the EmTech event in Arlington, Boston. Bush described athenahealth, supplier of cloud-based EHR and practice management software, as the “water boy” for the healthcare market that will do work that physicians do not want to do. Their company structure, he describes, is as the physicians do better work, the organization will see a gain on profit. Still, Bush said the organization is designed to do a lot more.

“What we privately think we’re doing, we think we’re developing the healthcare online,” Bush said. “What we think we’re doing is developing the circumstances where there can be enhancements in medical care. Healthcare does encounter advancement with caring and love and support and locations like MIT that spend money on it, but the circumstances are not there. The circumstances are to develop a better online, the circumstances for advancement are not there.” He considers his organization can help offer a better setting in which to innovate and yet, the street to achievements could still be bumpy because of protection issues such as HIPAA conformity.

“The key to medical care online is that it’s got a fiduciary, you know the factor that destroys us is you have to first do no damage,” Bush said. “Well in every other company location organizations burst and sprinkle over the walls all the time and that is where you say ‘oh, look at that guy, those courage actually would be really delightful, we can add that to my organization.’ You cannot really do that when individuals’ lives and protection are at stake, so the healthcare internet is going to go more slowly and be lamer than ‘the dating internet’ or ‘the purchasing for items internet’ but can we make a playground that is secure enough to allow at least some of that purchasing to go on, some of that that rising and falling.”

Global Healthcare Conference

Healthcare management from the private market and government departments will discuss improvement of global efforts to implement GS1 Standards that improve individual safety, provide chain security and efficiency during the International GS1 Healthcare Conference going on in San Francisco, Oct 1-3, 2013, at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District. Speakers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), California Board of Pharmacy, McKesson, Johnson & Johnson, Mercy, Pfizer and Premier will discuss best methods for applying GS1 Standards in healthcare.

More than 250 members from medical centers, producers, providers, market companies, government and regulating companies from 25 countries are expected to attend the conference. The three-day conference, designed “GS1 Standards in Action,” is organized by GS1 Healthcare US, an industry standards team targeted on driving the execution of GS1 Standards in the United States. “With individual safety at stake, market and government authorities globally are in lock-step to create techniques that will enable healthcare members to take better charge of the product information that flows throughout the supply chain, both locally and worldwide,” said Eileen Pheney, vice chairman of healthcare, GS1 US. “The conference offers global healthcare supply chain professionals understanding about standards execution techniques and improvement as well as market and regulating improvements in automatic recognition, traceability and information synchronization.”

Speakers represent multiple facets of the international healthcare supply chain, hailing from government departments, regulating bodies, medical industry companies, U.S. team purchasing companies, medical centers, producers, providers and retailers. Features include:

An opening plenary period targeted on unique device identification (UDI) with speakers from the U.S. FDA, the Japanese people Ministry for Health Welfare and Labor and others.
A period targeted on medical center execution of GS1 Standards, with demonstrations by providers such as Whim (U.S.) and Hospital Aleman (Argentina).
Presentations by international companies and regulating companies, such as the World Customs Organization and California Board of Pharmacy.
Perspectives from providers, such as Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and McKesson.
Closing keynote about bedside scanning by Mark Neuenschwander, an expert in drug providing automated and bar code point-of-care systems.

Transformation of Healthcare

Why are we changing healthcare? Why do we feel forced to act with such emergency and in such wide reformative strokes? Did we just awaken one morning shaken to our very core by the scale of having to complete the same health background form several times? Are we driven by hopelessness by the thought of an elderly homeless person having to suffer several fights of disease demanding frequent hospitalizations? Is our battle-forged feeling to human rights egregiously upset by the understanding that some People in America live a few months less than people living on the French Riviera? Or is it perhaps the American Dream, having satisfied itself in all other factors of our lives, that is now growing to the next frontier of toning down the healthcare system to independently and pleasantly serve our pursuit for everlasting happiness? Or maybe it has something to do with cold hard cash.

Healthcare, we are informed, is way too expensive. We are also informed that this is really our mistake because it is our job as customers to police markets, and wellness care is a business. The blame can be traced back in 1965 when we permitted government and consequently, third party payers to place themselves into a well-functioning industry, which treated us from the need to exercise stewardship of our limited sources and caused us to practice careless excessive intake of wellness care sources motivated by opportunistic avarice of medical companies. The obvious solution is that we continue our responsibilities as customers and definitely practice shopping for wellness care on our own penny and at the same time, our supporting benefactors will try to rebuild the wild array of multi-colored and ineffective suppliers into a lean wellness care machine better suited for present day mass consumption.

Mass consumption needs huge manufacturing, which in turn needs proper department of machines and networked software applications. Mass manufacturing improves the value and comfort of solutions for customers. Pay attention to the language. We are referring to value, as in “how much car for the dollar”, not about absolute great quality. A higher enough value feature allows cheap, low great quality products and solutions to be provided as great value good deals for smart customers. The term comfort is a lot simpler to parse, since it is really an inverse measure of calories consumed for the purpose of acquiring a particular service. You can buy anything today with some taps on your iPad, while sitting on the bathroom, enjoying the guidance of thousands of people in the same shoes as you. Nothing should prevent a present day customer from healthcare guidance from the same area.

American Healthcare

In a meeting during 2009 by the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Day said, in justifying the growth of private treatment centers or clinics, “What we have in Canada is access to a government, state-mandated wait list. You cannot force a resident in a free and democratic community to simply wait for medical care, and outlaw their ability to extricate themselves from a waiting list.” The Canada experience provides an opportunity to predict the future of healthcare distribution in the United States.

Over the past 20-30 years, the practice of medicine and healthcare has been gradually morphing into a government-run business, often with private health insurance coverage organizations working as the intermediaries. Medical health insurance price controls provide layouts for private insurance coverage compensation preparations. Handled care, motivated and developed by government regulation, needs suppliers to obtain permission from anonymous bureaucrats in order to provide many services they consider necessary for their sufferers. Recommendations and methods, drawn up by committees and sections serving government authorities, are enforced upon suppliers, demanding them to practice according to one-size-fits-all designs or face financial or even legal penalties.

While not the simple Canadian style single-payer program, the U.S. program, especially with the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, gets us to the same place, only in a more Byzantine fashion. True, there are several payers, but the plan suppliers, as a result of the ACA, have become nothing more than openly controlled resources. The guidelines they will be permitted to offer sufferers are all designed and pre-specified by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The provider payment conditions, as well as the coding program, as has been the practice for years, will be placed to Medicare insurance compensation plans. We are seeing more and more physicians retire or slow down their practices in reaction to the modifying practice atmosphere. Many are promoting their practices to healthcare centers and becoming shift-working healthcare center workers. Still, others are losing out of all insurance coverage plans, even Medicare coverage in some instances and embarking on cash-only “concierge” healthcare methods.

Automation of Healthcare

Medical centers are not the greenest of places. Even in the operating room where the greatest care is taken to make a clean environment, too often the contagious bacteria, viruses and even fungus are stubbornly present and contaminate patients under the knife. Today, medical tools are examined, sanitized and counted by hand and by multiple individuals. It’s an ineffective process that carries a risk for error. General Electric is trying to improve surgical tool care in hospitals by taking people out of the formula and letting a robot do the work.

An infection occurs in 1 to 3 surgery patients out of a hundred. While efforts are continuous to reduce surgical site infections, enhanced operating room air flow, enhanced cleanliness methods, the use of antimicrobials are still the most common sort of healthcare-associated infections, accounting for approximately 31 % of infections contracted by hospitalized sufferers. Of the 300,000 people that contract surgical site infections each year, about 3 % will die. And for the 97 % that endures, an infection can increase hospital stays and increase hospital bills by lots of money.

To help fight infections, the research department at General Electric, GE International Research, recently declared their plans to develop an automatic surgical device sterilization procedure. Each medical center has thousands of medical resources that need to be monitored and taken care of on a regular basis. Cleaning and planning them is hard work and requires the synchronization of several medical center workers. Allowing a robot locate, sanitize, sort and provide the medical resources without individual guidance, GE is designed to create a more efficient healthcare system. Automating the device care procedure, the company says, will improve cost performance, not waste time from kit set up mistakes, and improve individual safety in part by reducing medical infections. As opposed to their individual alternatives, a robot will make fewer mistakes while working what can easily become a boring job. In addition, more experienced workers can be released to do other projects. Healthcare-associated infections stay a significant wellness issue. That is why; this type of step is a good one for the healthcare industry.

Parents already know the worry that comes in when you think your kid has an ear disease. Then there is the mind-numbing shouts that your kid will make during the time it requires to get to the physician, complete the necessary forms and wait to be seen. All in all, a distressing encounter for both you and your kid (and your eardrums). Now, what if that procedure was converted to using your smart phone to breeze images of your kid’s ear and posting it to an app? From there, a physician could identify the disease and recommend the medication. You will avoid doctors’ workplaces and collections completely.

Mobile applications like this already are available and are trying to easily simplify individual healthcare. But scientists at Rock Health have discovered that even though there are more than 13,000 electronic healthcare applications, sufferers have yet to head to the pattern.

The mobile healthcare market has made significant progress within the doctor community. Rock Health found 75% of method and small size healthcare and dental workplaces will purchase tablets within the next year. And almost 40% of healthcare professionals use healthcare applications on a regular basis. The digital healthcare field is also treating the costs of patient care and increasing the scale at which physicians and the medical staff can help individuals. The healthcare market is already damaged, Zielger says, and a lack of primary care healthcare professionals in years to come will only aggravate the problem. She says mobile phone applications can link that gap.

But sufferers have been more slowly to realize the impact applications could have, Zeigler says, potentially because the applications force individuals to take notice of their own. “No one wants to definitely track what they are always doing, so we really want to make the experience inactive,” she told us, adding, they are scheming to create technical applications that “provide rewards for individuals to manage health more effectively.”