Reinventing Hospitals for a New Reality
Forbes magazine is catching on to what all of us in the healthcare business already feel every day we go to work.
While health care is typically seen as the one part of the economy least affected by downturns, recent reports show the financial meltdown already is affecting health care decisions. Almost one third of patients surveyed by Kaiser Family Foundation last month said they had skipped medical treatment, up from 24 percent in April. Drugmakers like Pfizer Inc. (nyse: PFE – news - people ) also have reported fewer prescriptions are being filled compared with this time last year.
Forbes did put some numbers that confirm the reality we all live with. When a third of patients decide to defer medical treatment, the old belief that healthcare was recession-proof takes a red-hot dive. Even the insured are backing off from spending. “Whenever you say there’s a health care crisis, most Americans say, ‘Gee, it must be my neighbor, not me,’ ” says Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton. “That’s because most Americans are not very sick. But when they really do need several different drugs, it can very quickly be very expensive.”
Layoffs are hitting most hospitals. Typically, cutbacks are made in departments that are not delivering care to patients but in reality there’s no department in a competitive hospital with community responsibilities that is easy to whack. Marketing and public relations take a fast hit — just when their skills are most needed to communicate to the public how to make good healthcare decisions when money’s tight. Which means simply that there are no easy places to cut … what is needed is a means to make all of these people more productive.
Put that news up against an article this week in the Washington Post:
Obama aims to make a “very substantial down payment” toward universal coverage by trimming tax breaks for the wealthy and squeezing payments to insurers, hospitals, doctors and drug manufacturers, a senior administration official said Wednesday. Embedded in the budget figures are key policy changes that the administration argues would improve the quality of care and bring much-needed efficiency to a health system that costs $2.3 trillion a year.
There will be a lot of pain to spread around.
As never before, the medical profession will be challenged to find new ways of delivering effective care more efficiently. This does not have to be doom and gloom unless we choose to see an empty glass. Instead, it calls on all of us who work in and support the nation’s hospitals to become more innovative in how we deliver clinical care. Many hospital leaders well have to rethink their entire strategies — in much the same way that President Obama appears to be reshaping the nation’s priorities.
Clinical process improvement, team collaboration, communications systems, revenue cycle management — every aspect of running a better hospital needs to be reassessed and reinvented. Those of us who like tackling a big challenge are in the right business!
Filed Under: Featured Articles • Hospital Leadership
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