What is the most compelling approach to integrate technology into healthcare facility strategy? How should healthcare facilities strike the balance between technology’s conflicting areas of impact? On the one hand; game-changing technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to hospitals for new service lines and revenue sources, but these same technologies (like tele-health), will challenge traditional approaches to facility planning.
Pyllar Group is focused on the strategic questions that will drive better decisions:
Pyllar Group is focused on the strategic questions that will drive better decisions:
- What impact will the emergence of consumerism have? Riding the back-bone of new technologies, a substantially more patient-centric delivery model will be demanded to replace the current provider oriented culture. E-mail, Tele-health, EMR and ePrescriptions will all contribute to the shift.
- What will be the impact of competition for scarce resources between “sticks and bricks” and technologies such as medical miniaturization, tetherless medical tools for in vivo diagnostics and therapeutics, robotic surgery, remote patient monitoring, etc?
- What role will hospitals play in the competition with pharmaceutical companies for service lines related to genetic diagnosis, testing and therapy? Will hospital labs emerge as the new service line of the next decade?
- Will Walmart sell healthcare? Experiments with mini-clinics and other iterations may indicate that consumers want to get their healthcare where it is most convenient and most affordable.
In the 1980s when powerful new imaging tools allowed physicians to detach large amounts of diagnostic and therapeutic work from hospitals and move it to sites they controlled, hospital admissions and lengths of stay were both reduced. Hospitals responded by incorporating new ambulatory services and aggressively pursuing both on-campus and off-campus strategies in pursuit of these services. Ambulatory services, which accounted for only 13% of hospital spending in 1980, grew to represent more than 37% by 2002. Inpatient services fell more than 20% and new ambulatory services became the hospitals most rapidly growing service.1
Hospitals are again challenged to shift their models.
1- American Hospital Association, Hospital Statistics 2003 (Chicago: AHA, December 2003)
Further reading that may be of interest…
Starchitecture Helps Heal Cancer Patients
TEDMED – Eric Topol: The wireless future of medicine
Getting Hospitalized Should Be Like Flying First-Class
Toward a Miniaturized Mechanical Surgeon
Disruptive Changes Are Coming to the Delivery of Medical Care
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