Reducing Costs and Improving Care: Tall Order for Health in the Future

By Deborah Hirsch
TMCnet Contributor

It’s clear we haven’t yet, as a nation, been able to bring the skyrocketing costs of healthcare down, nor the quality up. Deaths from medical errors cost almost 200,000 people their lives every year.

As a nation, we have a long way to go to improve care. “And while there are many notable efforts that have resulted in gains in care delivery it is not clear that, even if these efforts were broadly adopted, the gains would be sufficient to truly ‘bend the cost curve’ and materially improve care quality,” John Glaser recently posted at HealthWorks Collective.

He noted that “programs to evaluate shared savings, methods to coordinate care and ways to increase access to providers” have all been created and implemented. But what will help the state of healthcare be what we want and need is through health information technology (HIT) – “an essential enabler for these programs.”

Many new initiatives are in the works, as part of the Affordable Care Act. Health information exchanges (HIE), where patient data can be exchanged between providers statewide; health insurance exchanges, where patients can choose from a variety of policies, much like online banking; and finally, accountable care organizations, which aim at making quality pay in healthcare.

But most are just in the beginning stages (Massachusetts was just awarded $16.9 million to begin work on the nation’s first HIE) and it will take time to see if, and how well, they work.

Health IT is not a solution but a tool, according to Glaser, with participation through vendors who must constantly improve offerings; the development of solutions which provide ways to help customers do more with fewer resources, and the ability to help healthcare providers accept new ways of working, not only with technology but with each other.

“Organizations that may have competed in the past will need to realize that there may be a benefit to working together, sharing data and coordinating care,” Glaser cautioned.

Two hospitals are already doing that in Missouri, where they’ve joined in on an inpatient electronic health system.

It remains to be seen how well everything will work together to bring lower costs – and better health – to Americans. Many feel we’re moving in the right direction.

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