Historically, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved based upon the presence of an “event”, i.e., the need for a visit – planned or impromptu – to a medical provider and/or facility. The inefficiencies, glut of utilization and exponentially rising costs that flow from it as funded by the long-standing “fee-for-service” (FFS) payment methodology have been…
When it was launched 56 years ago, Medicare became the first single-payer insurance program in the U.S., guaranteeing medical coverage to virtually every American once they turned 65. Medicare has proven to be a crucial feature of the U.S. safety net, providing healthcare services to tens of millions of Americans while helping to keep them…
On July 9, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), the federal agency that oversees health information technology, announced a long-awaited change that could help doctors and nurses provide better, more timely care for their patients. The agency released an updated version of the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI), a…
The economic fallout related to the COVID-19 pandemic has yet to hit healthcare, but the result is likely to be an amplification of longstanding disparities within the U.S. healthcare system. Factors such as food insecurity, homelessness and access to care can affect a staggering 80% of patient outcomes. There is no single solution, and healthcare providers…
Nurses play a vital role in uncovering and addressing patients’ social determinants of health (SDOH), Julia Resnick, the American Hospital Association’s (AHA) senior program manager of strategic initiatives, told nurse leaders during AONL 2021, the annual conference of the American Organization of Nursing Leadership. “Health is more than just healthcare and there is a growing…
Over the last decade, members of the medical and public health communities around the world have widely studied and acknowledged the impact of social determinants of health (SDOH)—the conditions in the environments where people live, learn, work, play, and age—on a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life-risks and outcomes.[1] In the past year or…
Covid-19 laid bare the long-standing vulnerability of minority and low-income communities in U.S. society and its health system even as we celebrated the power of scientific innovation to rein in the pandemic. It’s time to turn that innovation, driven by an even greater mind shift, to end inequality in treatment. In perhaps no condition is…
Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age; they are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources at global, national, and local levels. Leveraging SDOH offers tremendous opportunities in healthcare. Increasingly, evidence suggests that focusing on “upstream” interventions outside of traditional clinical care…
The transition from a fee-for-service healthcare model to value-based care (VBC) in the U.S. has continued to gain momentum in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s because providers operating on a fee-for-service basis saw revenue fall sharply through much of last year as elective procedures were cancelled and many patients delayed primary care, even…
Public Health 4.0, or Population Health 4.0, is the recognition of health as a global entity and the focus on identifying and eliminating health disparities, unnecessary costs, and comorbidity. Unlike the previous three phases of public health, the focus in 4.0 is on population health management. As the healthcare industry moves toward a more holistic…