The Great Pandemic is in the rear-view mirror but the hangover of inflated costs for materials and staffing continue to be serous headwinds.
Yes, margins are improving and volumes are at or greater than in the pre-Pandemic years, but the recovery has been predictably uneven. The trend favors big systems operating across many states rather than sole providers, yet medical research hospitals and smaller systems that are nimble still are successful.
Rural Health America is at-risk of more rural hospitals closing, including critical access facilities, yet some are successful by innovating and meeting the needs of the community they serve.
Lessons learned during the Pandemic are generating useful changes and saving money. The challenges today are different than the take-off point of the Pandemic, which now seems like ten years ago.
Innovation counters change. More hospitals are designating a Chief Innovation Officer to lead the hospital through more Big Picture change. As always, the challenges and the pathway forward are unique to each hospital or system.
More C-Suites are embracing the best of strategic thinking as they lead their hospitals and systems to a new day. Financial modeling is continuous now and predictive analytics can forecast the net revenue impact of a potential decision or market change,
Algorithmic analysis works well but many believe this will be replaced by generative AI.
AI is changing quickly with more powerful chips that can interpret nuances and meaning more effectively, but faster chips will still not be able to deliver human-level logical inference. Also, AI will be unable to mimic accurately how different individuals communicate differently.
In the meantime, the Morgan and Morgan lawyer who thought it was a good idea to use AI to write his legal brief found out that AI “enjoys” fooling human beings because the cases cited were all fictitious.
Not to be outdone, two Federal District judges did the same thing.
AI at its best will help human beings be more efficient at many things, but it will not replace human intelligence.
What about AI as a teaching tool for our kids?
There is a reason some grammar schools are returning to teaching cursive writing; it patterns the brain in addition to teaching kids how to sign a cheque.
Some students are using AI to write an essay rather than do the hard work of ideation, research, creativity, and turning a phrase. In a recent study, one group of students wrote an essay using AI while the other group did the research and then wrote their essay.
Both groups were then tested on what they wrote. No surprise, the AI group remembered only 27% of their essay while the traditional group remembered over 70%.
This has nothing to do with health care, but it does prove use of AI in that setting causes a cognitive decline, and that is our future if AI is misused.
Big Tech is rapidly building new data centers for AI while America is reshoring its manufacturing capability. The demand for electricity will more than double in the next few years.Who will pay for the new data centers? How long will it take America to bring its manufacturing home?
Federal deficits doubled during the Pandemic and have continued. We are on a path to insolvency when the interest in our national debt is more than the budget of the Pentagon.
Some say the ACA was well-intentioned, but it never delivered on its promise of lower heath care costs and the ability to “keep” your doctor. Others say it was designed to be a vehicle to a single payer system, Medicare for all.
They say the way to fix it is to open markets across state lines to force more competition and build out the HSAs to give people more flexibility. Carve-outs for preexisting conditions would be in a separate pool rather than making everyone pay for this.
At the very least, rampant fraud with the subsidies needs to be eliminated and Congress must ensure that any fix includes federal funding (shared by the states) for charitable care because NFP hospitals are charged with treating all patients regardless of legal status or the ability to pay.
The adage, “Give them what they want” is an absolute of consumerism. The goal in health care is to deliver patient-centric and evidence-based medicine.
The new health care will overcome challenges which once seemed impossible, including delivering cures for lifestyle diseases, aggressive cancers, Parkinson’s, MS, and immune-system diseases, while raising holistic wellness to a new level as we age.
Yes, we are at an inflection point, and this is a great time to be in health care.
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