|
Looking At The Future of Healthcare
BY JAY JOLLY, CEO
One of the most interesting aspects of my job is looking ahead at all the changes that will affect healthcare delivery and evaluating the choices available to meet the healthcare needs of the community as those changes occur. It's a challenge for many reasons: most decisions about providing healthcare are expensive, with effects that last many years, and they often affect the ability to make other desirable or necessary changes, either for better or worse. Meanwhile, all the changes affecting healthcare delivery are occurring more and more rapidly. Many of them create challenges that health care providers have no control over and may add little or no value to improving the health of the community.
Many of the most significant changes affecting healthcare are technological changes. Clinical and information technologies in particular are seeing explosive growth, and some will create changes that business economists call disruptive - that is, they upset the usual way a business is conducted or a service is provided. For healthcare providers this means that how we've always done things in the past isn't how we'll be doing many of those same things in the future.
An example of a clinical technology expected to cause major changes in healthcare delivery is in the development of new drug therapies. With the human genetic code now fully described, several companies are working on drug therapies that can be more finely tuned to each individual's metabolism and physiology. Ever wonder why one antibiotic works really well for one person but doesn't seem effective at all for another, when both have the same diagnosis? Assuming both people really have the same "bug", the difference may lie in their individual metabolisms and how well their body can use the drug. New drug technologies seek to overcome these and other barriers to drug effectiveness by attacking diseases in new ways that will make advanced therapies more effective for more people. Many other clinical technologies in development have similar potential to dramatically improve diagnostic capabilities and therapeutic effectiveness.
Information technology has also grown tremendously to create an entirely new set of possibilities and challenges as it becomes easier to exchange patient information between medical providers to improve treatment. Patient information can already be sent around the world from one provider to another if both have the technical capabilities in place. However, this also creates a need for safeguards to protect the privacy of individual patients. How this will ultimately affect the sharing of medical information is still unclear, but it seems likely that patients will obtain greater access to information in their own medical record and have greater input on how, when, and with whom it is shared.
Goodland Regional Medical Center has invested significantly in information technology over the past few years in response to a trend that is clearly not going away. There are many parts to this massive puzzle, but the end result will be an integrated medical information platform that will enable physicians, nurses, and technicians to capture vital patient medical information, share it in a timely manner with other authorized providers, keep it away from unauthorized people, maintain it securely but also readily available for future needs, and improve the accuracy and consistency of the medical record.
This capability means that a local physician treating a patient in the ER could discuss the case with a specialist in Denver or elsewhere who is simultaneously looking at the x-rays or CT images the local physician has ordered here and visually evaluating the patient via video link. The specialist could speak with both the physician and a conscious patient at the same time. The same technology can provide nursing staff access to a pharmacist at a remote location late at night or on a weekend to have physician orders reviewed by a pharmacist for drug interactions and other safety checks. It already allows a Radiologist to read a digital x-ray or other image from their home or office in another city so local physicians have an imaging study read as quickly as they would with a Radiologist on site - at much less cost. At Goodland Regional Medical Center this capability already provides for telemedicine consults from specialists at KU Medical Center to improve continuity of care between on site visits. Our recent affiliation with the KU Oncology program through the Midwest Cancer Alliance is a great example of how information technology can help bring a network of providers together to provide the most up to date services in a cost effective manner that is also more convenient for patients.
Goodland Regional Medical Center views these technology changes as opportunities to improve services and continue fulfilling our mission of providing area citizens access to high quality, cost effective, community based primary care. We will continue to upgrade the clinical and information technologies that are appropriate and necessary to meet the healthcare needs of the community. We will provide education and training for staff to maintain current skills and learn new ones. And we will also recruit additional healthcare professionals who can help us upgrade or expand existing services while adding new ones.
The changes occurring in healthcare may create challenges, but we believe they also provide opportunities for rural facilities to maintain and expand services in ways that maximize access to the limited supply of medical specialists, retain services in local community health systems, provide convenient access to current technologies, help restrain healthcare costs, regularly update current knowledge and best practices in the local medical community, and strengthen the continuum of care with delivery networks that efficiently move patients to the most appropriate care setting as quickly as possible. Due to their primary care focus, their experience at operating creatively with grossly inadequate funding, and their ability to quickly respond to changing circumstances, some industry observers think that rural hospitals could become the laboratories from which the healthcare system of the future will emerge. I tend to agree. I do know it's going to be interesting.
 |
