Everyone in the industry is painfully aware of the state of hospitals today, even before the economic recession sent healthcare providers down a darker, deeper spiral. Add healthcare reform and the federal incentives for the meaningful use of health IT to the mix, and you’ve got major changes that would make mere survival monumental.
There are ways, however, to make these changes work in healthcare providers’ favor, and in executing those moves would benefit hospital, physician office and patients. One of them is called collaboration.
Many hospitals are extending financial help and IT resources to get physician offices connected with their EMR or EHR system. Obviously, the reason to do so is to get physicians to refer their patients to their facility, which would help billing and revenue generation, but the ultimate goal should be meaningful collaboration. If hospital and physician office can exchange patient data, continuity of care can occur and patient care should be enhanced. In this world of patient-centered medical home pilots, health information exchange is required. And if both physician office and hospital serve the patient well, the patient will return to both providers.
If you do the right thing, everything else will follow. So if you do right by the patient, which includes delivering clinical decision support, getting all the relevant patient data at the point of care or in real time – in many cases from health information exchange, the patient referrals and revenues should follow. If we focus on the patient and employ efficient means of taking care of those patients, we ought to have not only a sustainable but a growing business.
Photo by juhansonin courtesy of Creative Commons license.
