Over the last year or so, there's been a few trends that seem certain to emerge as key initiatives for the healthcare business. But I'd argue that despite the volume of talk about them, it's far from certain that they'll be mature enough to dominate the industry in 2014.
We've been following a lot of healthcare developments in recent months, and these are three such trends that we don't expect to see make the splash that some people expect them to make in the coming year:
1. ACOs: While the concept is widely discussed, and some large organizations are taking the plunge, it's still being adopted slowly. And that makes sense. After all, at a minimum, building an ACO right calls for a tremendous amount of leadership commitment, staff time, compatible workflows (or a process to develop them) and ideally, enough capital to build infrastructure that can support the partnership. We'd argue that this will trail into 2016 at minimum. In the mean time, doctors have told us that independent practices will be looking for ways to avoid the whole mess.
2. Mature EMRs: If you're enough of a techie to have seen the HIMSS Analytics scale (which ranks the percentage of EMRs at each of a series of seven stage of development) you'll see that the percent of hospitals at Stage 7 has pretty much stayed at 2%-ish for years. It seems unlikely that many hospitals are going to make it past the ever popular Stage 3 and Stage 4 where they've been lingering. They've got enough making sure the EMR simply does its job at the level it's at right now. As for when large numbers of hospitals will move up, that's so far on the horizon that we can't even offer a guess.
3. Health exchange plans working smoothly: It would be nice to think the the uninsured would gracefully embrace the plans sold on the health exchanges, and that doctors and hospitals would happily accept the plans. Instead, we have a situation where large numbers of doctors may refuse the HIX plans, hospitals and doctors are being kicked off HIX plan insurer networks, consumers are going to be struggling with sky-high deductibles if they do manage to buy a plan, and many insurers are hanging back with the ACA plans they do provide. We could go on but the picture is clear; the healthcare industry is going to deal with a bushel of headaches in this arena.
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