I recently interviewed Alan Kravitz, Founder and CEO of Medsys. We had a great discussion about a number of topics which I’m sure I’ll be writing about later. Although, in our conversation about the future of healthcare Alan mentioned this Eureka like thought for healthcare organizations:
Make Money by Keeping People Healthy
Think about how powerful that concept is compared to the way healthcare organizations make money today.
How we got lost on the reimbursement path we’re on doesn’t really matter. What matters is how we get back on the right path. The challenge is that we all realize this type of shift makes sense. However, I don’t see a clear pathway to that outcome. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on how we’ll get there. Plus, what systems and tools will we need to reach that goal.
>> “I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on how we’ll get there. Plus, what systems and tools will we need to reach that goal.”
In the broadest strokes, I think that it will be necessary for existing healthcare organizations to create new and separate business entities (revenue centers) in order to “be in that business”, which will hopefully have an entirely different monetization and reimbursement model for which their legacy billing and accounting infrastructure will be ill-suited to handle. IMHO, trying to shoehorn and/or retro-fit an entirely different business model into their current one would be ill-advised.
As far as the systems, tools and technology needed to support “health-oriented” healthcare, I believe it will begin with enabling support for the “quantified self” movement, and the platforms, tools and technology that go along with it.
TJL
TJL,
Great insight. Are we seeing new entities created already for this? I definitely think it’s a challenge and possibly impossible to have both business models under the same entity.