We conclude our short series on the Top 10 issues facing healthcare, as determined by its leaders.
A survey of healthcare leaders run by HealthCare Executive Group compiled the top concerns of healthcare leadership in the US. Since we know our fair share of hospital execs, this list didn't exactly surprise us.
(See our last post for the list of the rest of the Top 10, which was sadly lacking in GIFs. We're rectifying that mistake immediately.)
Let's count down the Top 5, starting with...
5. Interoperability / Consumer Data Access
How many passwords do you have? Is making every single one slightly different to meet the criteria of that particular website as much of a pain for you as it is for us? (We're talking more about inconvenience here than cybersecurity, although you should be paying attention to that, too.)
Now imagine you have to have five-to-twenty different logins for different parts of your healthcare. Except you don't have to imagine that, because it's the reality we're all living in now, thanks to how siloed and disconnected every aspect of healthcare is. To the point where it feels like you spend more time looking at a screen than a clinician's face.
Allowing consumers to access their information, securely and conveniently pay for services, and find out more about their care options - all online - is crucial to a positive patient outcome.
4. Data & Analytics
Dear All of Healthcare:
Sincerely, Z5 Inventory.
3. Delivery System Transformation
A big part of this point goes back to what we talked about in the last post: the social determinants of health. And it's about partnering with organizations who already know the people and how to serve them best. (We might know a thing or two about that.)
Bottom line: if you're keeping your community healthier, you're reducing the cost of care when they do eventually need to seek you out for healthcare.
And reducing cost is (spoiler alert) what it's all about.
2. Consumer Experience
It's really easy to get so caught up in keeping patients healthy that we forget to keep them happy, too.
Let's presume that we're all producing the best possible physical outcomes for patients. (That's greatly preferable to the alternative.) But patient care doesn't stop at the body.
Keeping the care in healthcare is what sets apart an exceptional experience from a series of pokes and prods from an indifferent assembly line in the factory of wellness.
1. Costs & Transparency
If anyone were surprised at the high cost of healthcare, it wouldn't have been the top issue driving the last election and probably the biggest debating point heading into the next one.
Rather than engage in the debate of whether it's more beneficial to make consumers aware of the actual, final cost of healthcare VS taking the burden of paying for healthcare off of individuals entirely, let's look at the more pressing issue: the fact that it costs so much at all.
We can all agree that part of the high cost of healthcare is its inefficiency. The massive amount of waste in this industry creates $5 Billion worth of expired medical supplies annually. And that's just one chunk of the overall inefficiency across the board.
Isn't it in everybody's best interest - providers, payers, and patients - to reduce cost? If that sounds good to you, it's worth investigating a method that's been proven to reduce waste and maintain quality of care.
We'll be interested to see what this list holds for us next year. In the meantime, we count down the Top 5 articles and news items in healthcare and the supply chain every other week in our Five To Save series. Keep up to date so that you can be a little less worried about the issues scaring everybody else in the industry.