Top 8 Challenges for healthcare companies today
The healthcare industry faces many changes that pose new challenges to medical practices of all shapes and sizes. The rapidly changing regulatory environment, technological innovations, and patient expectations are forcing medical practices to rethink how they do business and how they treat patients.
The healthcare industry will have to deal with the following 7 major challenges in 2021 and beyond:
Cybersecurity
Despite ransomware, data breaches, and other cybersecurity issues in the healthcare industry, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic revealed just how vulnerable sensitive patient health information truly is.
The increase of digital health initiatives – like telehealth doctor visits – has contributed to the considerable rise in breached patient records. As more healthcare functions move online in the next year, it’s crucial to ensure these processes are protected from external threats.
Telemedicine
The Covid-19 pandemic prompted consumers to utilize telehealth less and telemedicine more in 2019. It is still uncertain what the future holds for covid-19; however, telehealth adoption seems to be continuing to grow. 76% say they are highly or somewhat likely to use telehealth shortly.
The telehealth sector does not have a clear regulatory future and a potential digital health bubble.
Invoices and payments
Patients are becoming increasingly responsible for their medical bills, so medical practices cite patient collections as their top revenue cycle management challenge. Providers can encourage patients to submit payments responsibly by observing patient payment preferences.
To be patient-friendly, billing statements need to be user-friendly, as well as offering paperless statements and a variety of payment options through online patient portals. Use new features to communicate with patients more efficiently, such as text or email reminders.
In-house secure payment processing and a patient portal are problematic and expensive for medical practices. Not only do medical practices need to negotiate with each payment processor and build infrastructure, but they also need to absorb the ongoing operational and administrative costs.
Additionally, healthcare providers must abide by strict patient privacy guidelines. Make sure that your payment portal and processing system are compliant, else you risk incurring hefty fines.
Payment Model
To lower costs and increase service quality, financial incentives are now being determined based on patient outcomes, instead of service quantity.
Payers and patients are demanding new payment models that encourage care providers to coordinate services and promote preventive care, such as bundled payments, payments to patient-oriented providers, global payments, and shared savings.
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Nevertheless, there are many challenges to implementing these models and monitoring the processes within the existing system. For example, metrics need to be defined to assess performance and ROI.
Healthcare providers should pay close attention to this development, studying early adopters (e.g., Medicaid) and large organizations (e.g., Medicare) that are testing and fine-tuning new payment models to understand how to reduce cost and improve patient outcomes while staying profitable.
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Big Data
Even though healthcare data is being generated at a rapid rate, it is spread across multiple parties including payers, providers, and patients. There is no single “source of truth” that physicians can use to optimize the patient experience.
For instance, when patients change healthcare providers or insurance plans, most medical practices rely on patients’ self-reporting to complete their records.
Furthermore, healthcare data comes from many sources in varying formats. At present, there is no single system or technology infrastructure for retrieving, storing, and analyzing data from various sources at scale.
Leadership needs to embrace data-driven decision-making if healthcare organizations are to successfully harness the power of big data. Analytics should be weaved into the organization’s culture to instill trust in data so insights can be used to guide decisions at the executive level.
Healthcare organizations need better non-relational information technology to fully utilize all the patient data from a variety of sources, even though data will come in a variety of formats.
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Health Information and Services
Health companies can generate a massive amount of data by using connected medical devices and AI-integrated software applications.
This data can be of different types such as administrative data, patient medical records, connected device data, transcript & clinical notes, and patient surveys.
However, even the most advanced healthcare providers lack advanced architectures and data management systems to handle data collected from multiple sources.
The problem is using relational databases that can’t handle unstructured data from multiple sources efficiently, so the information they get isn’t always accurate.
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Healthcare providers could use a move from relational to non-relational databases to handle large and unstructured data. As a company expands and the data flow increases, the database’s architecture can be scaled to accommodate the new data.
Healthcare companies must develop all the models for all the layers of management — operational, tactical, and strategic — and partner with an integrator that has a mature service management framework to support integrated health networks.