- Hospitals will be looking to physicians who can reduce costs and avoid the need for expensive interventions to help them succeed.
- The surgeons (and other procedure-based specialties) will still be needed, of course, but they won’t have the rarified status in the future that they enjoy today.
Those who can find innovative ways to help patients improve their health status without a hospital stay or other expensive interventions will be the most successful in this new world.
Hospitals and physicians will also need to add technological capabilities to succeed. They will need to integrate data, analyze that data and use telehealth and remote monitoring to provide more effective use of resources and delivery of care. For many organizations, data integration probably seems overwhelming with too many applications speaking disparate languages.
The good news is that technology exists now which can create a nearly seamless interface among all these silos and allow data from a wide variety of sources to be used for population health, better treatments and more efficient operations.
Physicians will find a light at the end of the tunnel for those who hate their EHRs, as new vendors provide applications that make using an EHR simpler and more efficient. These vendors are creating applications that use the EHR and other clinical applications like a database, presenting patient data in a simpler, more clinically relevant user interface. This will mean that organizations can make their caregivers much more satisfied and efficient without having to ditch the huge investments they’ve made in clinical technology.
The next year will be a wild ride for many organizations, as they adapt to all these changes, but the work and effort should pay off in all kinds of important ways, liberating data for effective use in traditional clinical and patient care and unleashing innovation for its use and in new and unimagined ways.
This article originally appeared on the HIMSS16 Conference Blog here
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