We’ve been told for awhile that there’s a big change coming in how healthcare is delivered and paid for.
Update: The transformation is here, and it places a premium on efficient sharing of healthcare information.
That’s the word from Paul Grundy, M.D., MPH, a presenter at the 2012 CHIME/HIMSS CIO Forum in February. Grundy, who is president of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative and director of healthcare transformation at IBM, pointed to the growing percentage of healthcare that is now delivered via the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model – and also the growing share of payments from private and government payers now going to PCMHs.
A PCMH is a team of providers led by a personal physician who coordinates the patient’s care with various sub-specialists. As Grundy noted, no one provider in a PCMH completely owns patients or their data, so data has to be shared with all relevant team members – smoothly, quickly, and reliably.
Cloud-based medical info exchange has a role to play in this process. Where imaging files are concerned, no method better fits the PCMH scenario than a cloud-based service like eMix that almost instantly moves medical files and reports to any provider’s Web-connected computer, including tablets and smart phones.
Moreover, today’s Facebooking, tweeting patients expect new types of interactions with their providers, including virtual interactions.
As one sign that medical manufacturers have already geared up for this new reality, consider VGo, a new, remote-controlled “telepresence” robot that, among other uses, enables providers to see and interact with patients as if they were in the same room.
To understand the growing potential of patient-centered medical homes, just follow the money.
Two large private payers, WellPoint and UnitedHealthCare, are redoing their reimbursement and delivery approaches. On the government side, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has committed 11 percent of payments to approaches other than fee-for-service. This redirection of payments will drive more and more providers to adopt the PCMH model, Grundy said.
Why the sudden shift? It’s in part because payers are fed up with the inefficiencies of a healthcare system too heavily reliant on unregulated fee-for-service and rescue/specialty care, Grundy said.
The goal of the PCMH is to improve outcomes and reduce costs through coordinated care. Grundy described several studies showing that the PCMHs studied were already resulting in fewer hospital readmissions and shorter hospital stays.
What does it all mean? A new model of healthcare and provider compensation is here to stay. At the same time, robots at patients’ bedsides and imaging files shared via the cloud are carving a place for themselves in contemporary healthcare. The convergence of these new arrivals could be beneficial for all parties.