Keynoter Roy Beveridge MD, Oncologist and CEO of Humana www.humana.com opened the MedCityNews www.medcitynews.com conference “ENGAGE Innovation in Patient Engagement” held July 14-15 in Bethesda Maryland. He said, “Significant demographic changes are making the delivery of healthcare even more challenging with every passing year.”Dr. Beveridge reports, “The retailization of healthcare is beginning to affect the millions of Americans that will be purchasing healthcare and will continue to be an important and increasing part of the healthcare system for the next ten or twenty years and beyond.”
Today, as consumers are increasingly researching, choosing healthcare companies, and choosing products, the result is that healthcare is becoming more democratized. Some of the changes that are ongoing include using retail clinics for convenience to lower costs plus using technologies such as telemedicine and skype, to obtain solutions to health and medical issues.
According to Dr. Beveridge, “Other changes will take place to keep patients healthier and it is expected that population health will improve by 20 percent by 2020. By that time, value-based reimbursement should be in place along with medical homes, less fragmentation in the system, and focused care coordination available to all providers.
He adds, “What is new is that payers including Medicare are trying to work with doctors as a team to deal with the complex issues involving medical care. The goal is to bring physicians and clinicians together in a collaborative setting to center business decision-making around improved quality of care for individuals.”
Also, by improving clinical management, it is anticipated that costs will go down by 19 percent plus a higher quality of care will be achieved. The benefit to the patient is that they will be able to stay at home longer and readmissions to hospitals will be reduced
Dr. Beveridge, mentioned that CDC’s Health-Related Quality of Life www.cdc.gov/hrgol program is in place to measure the health of people in communities and help the public health community establish policies and programs to improve health-related quality of life.
Dr. Beveridge emphasized his points by showing the attendees a video produced by Humana where people can talk positively about “Health” and “Care. But when the words are put together into “Healthcare”, people tend to have negative thoughts. People need to think of healthcare in a positive way and will do so when healthcare is less fragmented and more efficient, so that doctors and patients are dealing with “health” care not “sick” care.
MedCityNews is presenting “CONVERGE” where healthcare meets innovation September 1-2, 2015 in Philadelphia. For more information go to http://MedCityConverge.com or #mcconverge.