The Difficulties of Cost Alignment Will Grow
The healthcare industry has faced a continued struggle to provide affordable healthcare for as long as modern medicine has existed; however treatment costs have dramatically spiraled in recent years. Healthcare providers must now cover the cost of implementing new technology, health records need to be converted to digital formats and the industry is facing even tougher regulations.
Any healthcare providers that have struggled to stay profitable in 2014 are going to find the next 12 months extremely difficult financially. 2015 is only likely to see finances strained even more with budgets needing to be stretched further still.
Provided the cost of implementation can be covered, new technologies can be leveraged to improve patient care and can dramatically reduce costs. However, many physicians and hospital administrators have struggled to see the benefit from digitalization and changing over to EHR’s. The transition may be problematic, difficult and costly in the short term, but the long term advantages cannot be disputed. The move to EHRs facilitates more accurate reporting and the analysis of electronic data makes decision making easier.
As healthcare organizations develop their systems to provide clean and consistent data – which can be accessed through all systems – it should translate into much greater efficiency and allow for significant cost reductions to be made. This will of course be a major challenge for providers over the course of the next 12 months.