Sometimes it’s easy to drink your own Kool-Aid®. In the case of Optimium Health, we believe problems with healthcare coordination inside hospitals are so bad that the pathway to corrective action and proven technology solutions must obvious to everyone. While many health systems recognize the problems they choose to believe EHR’s are the Holy Grail. EHR’s can solve everything that ails their organizations. After all, for northwards of $10 million dollars these EHR’s should fix the problems.
So when I read Closing the Technology Gaps Between the Clinical & Business Sides of Healthcare, by Tom Furr (Health Data Management, January 2016), I realized I was not drinking Kool-Aid®. There are others who believe what we believe.
In the article, Mr. Furr cites that a lot of what healthcare needs to do to bring its “business side” into the 21st century was developed by other industries and is available today. Industries like banking, travel, and manufacturing. However, up to now, the focus of technology advancements in healthcare are on the clinical side on the front lines of face-to-face patient care. They are not the business of back room where care-coordination lives.
Mr. Furr summarizes this belief in the following excerpt:
“Massive development activities and hefty investments in technology that advance the clinical side alone will not bring healthcare systems into the future. It may well further enhance the ability to diagnose, treat and prevent any number of medical maladies. But the industry will not move into the future if the other side of the healthcare house still operates with technology developed in the 1980s. The back office of healthcare, which the patient used to never see when insurance paid most, if not all of the bill, is becoming as important and prominent as the clinical side, and is just as important in the patient engagement equation.”
Follow this link for the entire article: https://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/closing-technology-gaps-between-the-clinical-and-business-sides-of-healthcare
If you would like information on how Optimium Health can help your health organization make meaningful advancements in care coordination through proven and affordable technology solutions, please contact Heather Guild at heather@waohi.azurewebsites.net