Road Blockers in US Healthcare

Healthcare technology is transforming the way care is delivered, though several roadblocks will make this journey difficult. Let’s see the major roadblocks in Healthcare:

• Financial Challenges: Financial challenges such as Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement as well as RCM contribute added complexity for maintaining cash flow within the systems.
• Implementation of Healthcare Reforms: When developing an information system integrated with primary care MDs, Regulatory/legislative uncertainty is affecting strategic planning, and the study of avoidable readmissions to avoid penalties. With large numbers of applications available in inpatient care, it is increasing the pressure on the systems integrator to make a multitude of applications interoperable. This adds to the uncertainty affecting strategic planning and study of avoidable readmissions to avoid penalties.
• Regulatory Mandates: Complexities, unclear understanding and adherence to CMS regulations, implementation of ICD-10, State regulations are also other roadblocks created by federal mandates.
• Patient Safety and Quality: Medication errors caused during care delivery, both during prescription and administration, are still big concerns. This is now getting addressed through the use of CDSS (Clinical Decision Support System) in an EHR system, and other tools that perform validation using scan codes to avoid any safety issues.
• Patient Satisfaction: Patient satisfaction is an indirect indicator of the quality of a doctor or of hospital performance. Patient-focused care should be consistently delivered in a particular way. It has to happen for every patient and at every time.
• Care for Un/Under-Insured: Hospitals and physicians have to bear the financial burden of the uninsured as billions of dollars in bad debt or “uncompensated care”. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, more than fifty percent of emergency care goes uncompensated.
• Physician-Hospital Relationship: Advances in US healthcare give importance to the need for greater cooperation between physician and hospital. To illustrate, payers are tying reimbursement to outcomes such as reductions in unnecessary readmissions, falling disease rates and reducing operating room times. In order to meet these expectations, hospitals will have to work closely with physicians.
• Population Health Management: Population health management is the compilation of patient data from multiple health information technology resources and the consolidation of the data into a single, actionable patient record. With these, care providers can improve clinical and financial outcomes.

To conclude, the above areas suggest a poor quality of care and dissatisfaction among the majority of the patients and healthcare professionals. There is a need to adequately utilize the power of Information technology along with the perfect collaboration of passionate health care reformers. Feel free to write to us if your healthcare enterprise is facing similar challenging roadblocks.