Predictions for Healthcare in 2012

February 21, 2012 · Leave a comment

Industry Insights from Paul Meade, M. Sc., MPH

While the Mayans might have been good at developing a cosmic calendar with 27,000-year cycles, I will try to venture only one or two years out and predict some developments within the healthcare system.

I dare say the Mayans had great foresight about changes, even if they never invented the wheel, but clearly they missed the fact that 2012 was an election year in the United States, and that predicting change became no mean task with orders of magnitude of difficulty. Nonetheless, I will attempt to gaze into my crystal ball and give my predictions for the next little while.

The promise of personalized medicine has been swirling around in the minds of brilliant people for well over a decade now, but we are patiently awaiting the results to impact our daily lives. Throughout the past 10-15 years, advances in the personalized medicine field have been somewhat slow to appear on the landscape. We should not be too discouraged by this advancing timeline, since we are still waiting for a cure for cancer after many decades of highly-funded research. Yet, each day, scientists are discovering more and more biomarkers with the potential to move us closer the reality of personalized medicine.

These biomarkers are not only predicting diseases—they are identifying companion diagnostics, indicating response levels to ... read more »

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The Demand for Quality Healthcare–Who Cares?

August 11, 2010 · Leave a comment

Industry Insights from Paul Meade, M. Sc, MPH

Quality measures in healthcare have been sadly lacking for many years, despite the recognition that this information was needed to optimize healthcare delivery. Information technology is the key driver to obtaining quality measures. Advances in outcomes research, access to claims information, greater data processing capabilities, integration of information systems, implementation of electronic medical records, and accurate and meaningful quality measures will lead to vast improvements in the delivery of optimal healthcare. But who cares?

It is likely that quality measures will lead to the greatest improvements in healthcare, and ultimately drive costs down. And this makes us all winners! When all healthcare providers are accountable not only for the care they offer, but also for the quality of that care, then the economics of the system will improve to generate the greatest value. As the saying goes, “The most expensive treatment is the one that doesn’t work.” Quality measures have a way of weeding out the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of a system. And who doesn’t want the most effective healthcare at the least cost!

One potential unintended consequence of improving outcomes and quality measures is the temptation to ration healthcare delivery. Remember, quality is a function of cost verses benefit to derive maximum value. So going too far down the path of quality could ... read more »

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High Healthcare Costs–Well, What Do You Expect?

July 16, 2010 · Leave a comment

Industry Insights from Paul Meade, M. Sc, MPH

We all know that the cost of providing healthcare has been steadily rising throughout the world over the last few decades. While there are many nations that have very little healthcare services, there are those with an over-abundance of such care delivery. People everywhere have begun to see healthcare as an entitlement, rather than a privilege. And why is this so?

After World War II, many governments quickly realized that a healthy workforce is a productive workforce, and as such, began to adopt various forms of subsidized healthcare to offer to their citizens. Most countries introduced a form of universal healthcare provided by a single payer, the government. These central governments for the most part decided what products and services they would offer to their people, based on what they could afford with their budgets. For some countries, this was very little, and only the privileged few, while other countries offered everyone some form of healthcare coverage. The United States was different. They rejected the notion of a government-organized healthcare system and opted for the privatization of healthcare. After all, the U.S. was founded as a free nation that broke the shackles of the British monarch. And besides, the medical profession did not want to be constrained by the tyranny of a controlling government ... read more »

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The Future Integration of Long-Term Care by the Screenagers

July 6, 2010 · Leave a comment

Industry Insights from Paul Meade, M. Sc, MPH

One word that optimally summarizes long-term care in the United States is fragmentation. Like a microcosm of the overall fragmented healthcare system in the U.S., long-term care suffers from similarly fragmented clinical care, living care, and financing. As the population ages and Baby Boomers retire and take on a host of chronic illnesses, the problems of long-term care need to be solved fairly quickly. And who better to fix the long-term care fragmentation than the “screenagers?” What’s a screenager? Read on.

While the Baby Boomers did not create a fragmented healthcare delivery system, they certainly contributed to its broader and deeper fragmentation. They are a generation that demands instant gratification, has high expectations, and suffers from an entitlement mentality. As children of the Depression generation, they were given everything their parents were denied growing up; thus, they began to expect more. Baby Boomers will not tolerate growing old and not having the best of everything–which, for this discussion, includes long-term care. While the Baby Boomers are too impatient to wait for the fragmentation of the long-term care system to integrate itself, they are certainly too busy to do it themselves.

So, who will come to their rescue? Appropriately, the saviors of the Baby Boomers are the generations that follow them– Generations X and Y–or, as ... read more »

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