President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 to reduce the economic burden of the ACA. Here, five health IT company executives discuss the keys to success for hospitals and healthcare providers going forward.
Darin Brannan. President, CEO and Co-founder of ClearData, a secure healthcare managed cloud provider (Austin, Texas). "Two big elephants in the room were noticeably missing from President Trump's executive order — data security and system interoperability. Given the major challenges in these two realms, they're surprising omissions, as the ACA has been blamed as their root cause. Still, it's impossible to predict the president's intentions here this far out. Healthcare organizations should continue to take a 'we're on our own' perspective and keep taking active steps to secure their data while making it accessible to their provider partners, payers, patients and other stakeholders. Another takeaway from the executive order is the promise to open up the market. As we now know, changes in the healthcare landscape almost always result in a proliferation of new apps, so look to opportunities to bring these apps to market faster. For scale, speed and security reasons, a cloud environment will be a must for all these data-intensive projects."
Jean Drouin, MD. Founder and CEO of Clarify Health Solutions, a digital and analytics solutions company (San Francisco). "Politics aside, everyone agrees that healthcare costs are too high, and patients deserve better from our healthcare system. The ACA jump-started a transformative movement toward value-based care, and continuing down that path is essential to achieving lower costs and better outcomes. While the future isn't entirely clear, we're confident that value-based care will move forward in some form. It has proven to be mission critical for improving healthcare delivery — and is perhaps the most effective strategy that we have for reducing healthcare costs in 2017 and beyond."
Dave Dyell. President and CEO of Jellyfish Health, a patient check-in software platform (Panama City, Fla.). "Although the language is broad, President Trump's executive order seems aimed to open the market up to more options for healthcare consumers, and not just for insurance. Look at section four's reference to more interstate commerce of healthcare services. Really, it's time to double down on improving the patient experience, or local healthcare consumers could be lost to national telehealth chains. The window to differentiate is short, too. Yes, you need an overall patient experience strategy, but it needs at least one tactic that immediately creates a better experience — like mobile apps that make it easy for patients to find and schedule care in their area, and even make anywhere the waiting room for them."
Brent Lang. President and CEO of Vocera Communications, a clinical communications system provider (San Jose, Calif.). "Ultimately, healthcare IT investments should focus on four holistic improvement strategies that endure no matter what happens with ACA: enhancing efficiency, quality and safety, patient experience and staff well-being. All of these aims are essential in healthcare, no matter what changes may occur with policies or payment models."
Siva Namasivayam. CEO and Founder of SCIO Health Analytics, a healthcare analytics company (West Hartford, Conn.). "Despite these new announcements, the focus on delivering high quality, efficient healthcare that offers better access and improved patient outcomes will remain. One area where the industry is likely to see changes is in the individual mandate, so the funding underpinning any replacement program will need to be reviewed carefully. The challenge will be in finding a way to maintain optimized margins. States can expect to have an expansion in their Medicaid programs, which will accelerate the need for and ability to identify, profile and intervene quickly to avert massive cost impact. No matter what the specifics turn out to be, the key to success will be developing actionable insights from the data available across the healthcare continuum to support the continued evolution toward value-based care and reimbursement."
More articles on health IT:
19% of healthcare cyberattacks caused by hacks, malware in 2016, down from 2015
Medical industry accounted for 9.2% of breaches in 2016
13% of US businesses prepared to handle a ransomeware attack: 5 things to know