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Are You Ready for the Future of Healthcare?Change and Challenge Brings Opportunity  By Sunny Sanyal President McKesson Provider Technologies Healthcare issues have moved beyond the CEO's office to the Oval Office as elected officials, policymakers, public and private businesses, special interest groups and others debate over fixing our broken system. And for good reason — the cost of delivering and insuring care continues to rise. Eighty percent of Medicare spending (which totaled $425 billion in 2007) was for treating patients with multiple, often preventable, chronic conditions. The number of uninsured and under-insured Americans is growing rapidly. Quality and patient safety are not as good as they should be. And the "baby boomers" are nearing retirement and threatening to capsize an already flooded system that is facing even lower reimbursement models. In mid-July, 60 chief executive officers from U.S. hospitals of all sizes gathered at McKesson's CEO Executive Leadership Summit to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing American healthcare. Much of the conference was devoted to a series of roundtable discussions on critical issues in healthcare, including: > Balancing financial performance during rapid adoption of advanced clinical IT > Financial and infrastructure implications of physician alignment > Leveraging grants to connect the settings of care > Aligning incentives to prepare for different reimbursement models > Improving financial performance in today's economic environment  Each roundtable focused on a single industry challenge. However, healthcare's challenges aren't standalone issues. They are much more like a Rubik's cube: several sides, many colors, interconnected and constantly changing in an effort to achieve balance. If you twist the Rubik's cube around long enough, the cubelets align into solid color faces. In healthcare, no matter how many ways we twist the issues around, monochromatic challenges or solutions don't happen,
which is why common themes – physician alignment, care coordination and continuity of care, and financing healthcare – surfaced in most of the roundtables. Not surprisingly, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) was another recurring theme. Can stimulus funds actually stimulate clinical IT efforts? How can incentive dollars enhance care coordination and continuity? How does an organization tap into newly available IT funding without tapping out the bottom line? And what is meaningful use? CEOs are asking questions; but they are not just waiting for all the answers. Neither is McKesson. As the industry waits for definition of HHS certification, McKesson is evaluating the meaningful use criteria that have been proposed, assessing current product functionality in light of the criteria and mapping criteria to future product functionality. Our Strategic Considerations Survey and Achieve HIT Readiness Assessment will help you draw an IT roadmap for anticipated solutions for achieving meaningful use. And we are pleased to note that, with the exception of requirements that remain to be more fully defined (codification of data, interoperability and security/privacy requirements), the current releases of all our electronic health record (EHR) solutions already contain much of the functionality you need to meet most of the proposed meaningful use criteria. McKesson will continue to monitor emerging requirements as they are defined to help our customers meet meaningful use requirements. No matter what happens in Washington, health information systems and connectivity solutions will play a defining role in healthcare's future. No matter where on the IT adoption continuum your organization may be, we are confident you will find great value in the CEO insights shared during the 2009 Executive Leadership Summit roundtables. |
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