Operations
Is your hospital's case management model strictly focused on discharge planning and retroactive utilization reviews? If so, there's no better time to transition to an updated, outcomes-driven model, that focuses on the big picture, than right now.
The medical tourism industry must respond to the problems found in surrogacy tourism. The first is the need for medical tourism companies, brokers, clinics and even hospitals to hold patient funds in escrow. Abuse of patient trust by misappropriating funds should no longer be an issue.
For those in the medical tourism industry, the issue of "surrogacy tourism" or commercial surrogacy is not an issue of morality. Whatever one believes, there is a need for surrogacy services and people will take chances with the law in order to have children.
Seismic changes altering the healthcare industry are creating an increasing number of compliance requirements for hospitals and health systems to meet. This means a larger role for an organization's chief compliance officer.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is exporting its knowledge and management services around the world, to countries like China and Lithuania that are expanding healthcare for emerging middle class populations.
The emergence of digital and retail health is a clarion call for hospitals and medical practices to innovate and improve the patient experience. However, providers could lose patients to retail companies if the seeds sown by the likes of CVS, Walgreens and Walmart take root.
When a healthcare provider's data resides on someone else's servers, plenty can go wrong. And HIPAA isn't necessarily the worst of it. Experts offer contracting advice to help head off financial and legal disputes between vendors and providers.
It wasn't all that long ago that most surgeries, and many medical and diagnostic procedures, required patients to plan for an inpatient hospital stay. But times have changed.
In an era of mounting fiscal uncertainty marked by downward trending net revenue at hospitals, the need for cost reduction has never been greater. Yet, many cost reduction efforts fail due to a lack of understanding about "the how" of achieving real, measurable cost savings.
Hospitals and health systems try their best to anticipate and meet the demand for specific drugs. But drug shortages - whether due to outbreaks of specific illnesses or unanticipated supply bottlenecks - are a fact of life in the medical world.