Health care costs far too much. We can do it better for half the cost. But if we did cut the cost in half, we would cut the jobs in half, wipe out 9% of the economy and plunge the country into a depression.
Really? It’s that simple? Half the cost equals half the jobs? So we’re doomed either way?
Actually, no. It’s not that simple. We cannot of course forecast with …
After decades of bravely keeping them at bay, health care is beginning to be overwhelmed by “fast, cheap, and out of control” new technologies, from BYOD (“bring your own device”) tablets in the operating room, to apps and dongles that turn your smart phone into a Star Trek tricorder, to 3-D printed skulls. (No, not a souvenir of the Grateful Dead, a Harley decoration or a pastry for the Mexican Dia de …
If you are a CEO or COO of a health care organization, and your IT people have been trying to get your attention, it’s time to have a serious sit-down with them.
If they haven’t been trying to get your attention, it’s time to have an more serious sit-down with them, complete with charts and graphs and arrows on fip charts.
Here’s why.
Remember in November it was revealed that the Target retail …
Hospitals need to overhaul their processes so they can help the un- and under-insured stay healthy.
Many people running health care institutions tell me that they have been fighting the fight, learning to be nimble, transforming their cultures, making big changes as the landscape rearranges itself like a really bad day along the San Andreas Fault.
But in comparison with the actual scale of the problems, most of the business models and …
The progeny of the iPhone and the iPad will change the shape of your institution — and your balance sheet.
One of the more striking images, to me, out of the online spew in the last few months was from the inauguration. It was a wide view of an inaugural ball. There was the president waltzing with the first lady, and a crowd of several hundred watching them. What was striking …
Rapid change is engulfing health care across the United States, but the strategic responses of organizations to these changes are sharply divided. In the shift that has been broadly shorthanded “from volume to value,” many organizations across the country are deeply engaged in moving toward “value” by building new partnerships, affiliations, capacities and economic structures, striving to bring better health and health care to more people for less money.
At the …
Costs and revenue: This is the oxygen of any business, any organization. What are your revenue streams? How much does it cost you to produce them? Life is not just about breathing, but, if you don’t get that in-out equation right, there is nothing else life can be about.
Right now this enormous sector is turning itself inside out. It has turned the “transmogrification” setting to “warp.” Why? It’s all about …
It was some doctor show on cable: Nurse McCarthy bustles into the hospital room, says “Good morning!” brightly, and crosses the brilliantly polished linoleum floor to the window. Humming to herself, she sweeps open the curtains to the view of the brick wall across the airshaft, then goes to the patient on the right and checks his dressing, clucking and offering encouragement. After a few moments she does the same …
Today and for the next few years the weather of this industry will be dominated by pervasive, discontinuous change. Structures, revenue streams, relationships of every level: All are shifting in fundamental ways. Specifically, the weather will be driven by:
i) invention and propagation of new business models;
ii) shifting risk onto both the provider and the patient, accompanied by building of new risk-based relationships, contracts and alliances;
iii) smart primary care coming to …
The current reorganization of health care could make it better and cheaper for everyone, harnessing real creative and competitive energies to build the “next health care” —or it could lead to local monopolies, higher prices and less real competition where it matters. The many and various moves toward accountability, competition and transparency could defeat themselves.
The theme of the reorganization is clear: new types of cooperation between physicians, hospitals and other …
It’s getting scary.
We are facing, before the end of this decade, a bifurcated future. The way things are going now—with the economy wheezing, doctors bailing, chronic disease rising fast, boomers sliding out of the Viagra years into the Depends years, reimbursements getting squeezed ever tighter, Medicaid sputtering on fumes, and 30 million or more new people soon swarming our doors with insurance cards—if we don’t pull a rabbit out …
“Someone needs to take this writer out and kick his ass.”
The quote leaped out at me from a New York Times article.
Now, maybe I’m a little sensitive about using physical threats to try to silence writers, since I am a writer. Maybe I am especially sensitive about threatening to kick someone’s ass for writing about healthcare. To my eyes, the quote stood out as emblematic of the tumor …
Here’s a simple key to parsing the future economics of healthcare. We have been trying for over 30 years to control healthcare costs. And there is little evidence that any of these efforts have had much effect. For decades the rise in healthcare costs has been consistently several times higher than the general inflation level.
There have been dozens of schemes used in various parts of the industry — inpatient, ambulatory, …
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They are coming in fast under the radar, out of peripheral vision, in the magician’s other hand—and they will change everything. New ideas, surprising networks, stealth business models that may change health care profoundly, are bubbling up in pilot programs, experiments and full-on corporate transformations. There is something here that does not yet have a name, that no one is yet calling a movement, that no one is yet seeing …
The country seems to have shifted in less than 18 months from a slogan of “Yes We Can!” to “Oh, well…” and a shrug, then back to “Cool! I think. What was that, really?”
Hopes for a true rebirth of health care turned into the Year of Screaming Inanely, then took that long slide from what we might hope for to what we might settle for. Yet suddenly it seems like …
The rapidly ramifying crisis in health care may (we can pray) end all delusions. It may at least begin to weaken them by exposing them to the light, to the sobering effects of reality.
The reform act has not brought us to the Promised Land. By bringing us access without capacity, fierce restrictions coupled with vague language and loopholes, mandates coupled with fines low enough to become the cheap way out, …
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