There are several trends making an impact on orthopedic and spine surgery practices today.
David Jacofsky, MD, CEO of The CORE Institute, discusses five key trends changing healthcare today and how orthopedic practices can take advantage of them.
1. Telemedicine will have a huge impact on providing care in the future. Patients are looking for a more efficient way to access their physicians and telemedicine meets that need. "We have some proprietary platforms that allow us to do telemedicine from our website," says Dr. Jacofsky. "If patients have a computer and the internet, we can do two-way video and talk to them. If the patient has a hip fracture, instead of loading them in an ambulance and taking them to the hospital for a wound check, they could go to the telemedicine room in their skilled nursing facility and have their vital signs taken."
Physicians and therapists could also check on the patient and do follow-ups over telemedicine if necessary.
2. Mobile health technology will keep patients in check. Therapists can use technology similar to the Wii for patients to complete their therapy, and they'd only need to go into the office if they begin missing their benchmarks. Wearable RFID devices, for example, can monitor patient progress to alert physicians or specialists if too much weight is placed on a cast or if the patient hasn't walked a certain number of steps per day. There are applications that can tell whether the patient is sleeping enough or active enough, whether they opened their medicine bottles at appropriate times throughout the day, even measure compartment pressures and vital signs, and record that directly in to the patient's EMR," says Dr. Jacofsky. "I think that will dramatically lower overall costs in addition to improving quality."
3. The lack of interoperability is the biggest risk going forward in healthcare. Different IT and EMR systems don't speak to each other, and physician groups outside the hospital network may suffer as reporting requirements continue to increase.
4. Data gathering isn't normalized by physicians, so assuming risk is tricky. Outcomes and quality data treats every patient the same, even though sicker patients are at higher risk for complications that could penalize physicians and hospitals when compared with providers caring for healthier patients. "Those physicians with the sickest patients may appear to have the worst outcomes," says Dr. Jacofsky. Risk-bearing contracts financially reward better outcomes, but surgeons caring for the sickest patients shouldn't be penalized.
5. There are still some providers who haven't fully integrated EMR and IT, that aren't gathering data or preparing to assume risk. They aren't prepared for the changing healthcare system, which could leave them behind. "There is a bigger gap between the more sophisticated organizations and those that haven't changed," says Dr. Jacofsky. "There are companies that will fundamentally transform the way healthcare is delivered going forward, and we hope to be one of those companies."