In recent years, the telemedicine market has grown to be worth more than $30 billion. If you aren’t prepared for how changes like that are reshaping the field of healthcare and your enterprise structure, you could lose out to competitors. You need to balance the changes in providing care with the demands of your clientele.
Here are four ways that healthcare and enterprise structures are being changed by coming trends.
1. The Boom is Unsustainable
As baby boomers are soon to be the majority of people needing long-term care for longer than ever in history, the healthcare system is ballooning. At every level, from rehabilitation to preventative care and hospice, both inpatient and outpatient capacities are being stretched.
As the reimbursement rates have also dropped in some cases, the amount of revenue coming in is seeing a dip.
Healthcare growth has held steady when it comes to cost but it’s catching up with the economic growth for consumers. When cost comes too close to the amount a facility can charge, profits dip into dangerous territory.
The one important thing this boom has done has been to highlight inefficiencies in the system. When your operations budget is bloated with inefficient processes and redundant work, you can save money by analyzing your systems.
With the help of data analytics, you can find inefficiencies in how information is processed and what data you could be overlooking. If you’re working at a large facility, you need to make sure that the conclusions you draw are actionable. Alerting your staff that they need to make changes that are incompatible with their workflow will exhaust them.
Come up with systems, figures, and data that your staff can’t ignore so that you can provide value to everyone as you roll out your next change.
2. Consumers Will Be Empowered
As more consumers have access to information about their own healthcare, they will be able to make more informed decisions. Rather than relying on top-down solutions, ways of doing business can be crowdsourced or generated by users. Participation can play a massive role in changing care.
The more that your patients take action, the more they’re able to make decisions based on the cost of care and how convenient it is. Rather than centralizing everything, care will be dispersed.
Telemedicine might be one of the biggest revolutions to happen to healthcare in the last few decades. Not only does it give more people access to better healthcare, but it takes away much of the administrative costs for providers.
To get appropriate healthcare in the past, patients often have to travel and schedule appointments. Even for short follow-up appointments that take mere minutes, this is an inconvenience for everyone. With the help of telemedicine, these kinds of short checkups can be eliminated and facilities can work more efficiently.
3. Consolidation is Changing Systems
With systems being merged around the country, the way that healthcare is provided is being resculpted. Merged systems could save on administrative costs theoretically, but there are other costs to consider.
The amount of training necessary to keep staff up to date on new technology and trends is a drag on profits. Also, when you merge staff, you might deal with redundancies and layoffs accompanied by severance, unemployment insurance, and pension spending spikes.
Operating margins end up tightening at a lot of consolidated sites, because of the scale of these sites. Without the ability to pass value along to consumers as they grow, they’ll end up spending more on administration than smaller enterprises would.
Unless your consumers can see ways that your consolidation benefits them, they won’t want to pay more for the costs you incur. It’s the enterprise’s responsibility to get rid of redundancies and inconsistencies. If you eliminate services, it could send your customers packing.
Improving the healthcare system relies on specialization. There should be a few amazing places doing the best work in lung care or in heart surgery. When everyone is claiming an ability to do the kind of complicated work that patients need, the quality of care goes down.
Without enough demand, the staff is kept on the payroll just in case anyone requests that service. That can be a massive drag on profits.
4. Technology Can Cost Money or Save Money
Paying to implement a new tech system for a healthcare facility can require millions of dollars in investments before you even see a result.
The kind of technology available to healthcare providers and patients is rapidly expanding. There are new ways for patients to get care and for physicians to provide it. While it is nice if your facility can provide the latest type of telemedicine, you need to ensure that there’s a demand for it.
As customer interactions have moved beyond the four walls of the hospital, healthcare providers are in a precarious position. They need to both be able to provide care when its needed while also managing the costs of branching out.
Collecting lots of data is easier than ever and it seems necessary in many regards, but if you don’t know what to do with this data, the effort is wasted. You need to be able to leverage that data into saving money and producing better outcomes for patients.
Through strategic enterprise transformation, you can ensure that your facility invests in technology that eventually saves money.
The Enterprise Structure of Medicine is Changing Drastically
With the help of technology and the ways that healthcare is becoming more convenient for patients, healthcare providers are being pressured to change. The more that providers are forced to meet their patients halfway, the better service they’ll provide them.
For more information on how data is changing healthcare, check out our latest guide.
