Bringing Home the Future of Medical Devices

There’s a massive shift taking place in U.S. healthcare, and too few device manufacturers are using it to their advantage. With health system costs ballooning more than $100 billion over the last five years while inpatient admissions remain flat1, health system executives are concluding that their inpatient-centric, treatment-centric business models are the wrong strategy. The inpatient setting is simply too expensive with too few patients utilizing it to effectively distribute the costs. This is causing profit margins to shrink at the same time as readmission penalties harm providers that fail to keep patients out of the hospital. Recognizing the dire nature of the situation, former President and CEO at the Geisinger Health System David T. Feinberg M.D. (now CEO of Google Health) articulated his strategy in a Fixing Healthcare Podcast: "I run a health system and we have about 13 or so hospitals and I think my job is to close every one of them.” 2  The United States spends $3 trillion on healthcare each year, and 86 percent of these costs are due to chronic disease. If chronic disease could be managed at lower-cost, lower-acuity settings or be prevented altogether, the impact to health spending could be significant. There is no lower-acuity, lower-cost setting than the home. Its potential benefits are clear: Studies have shown that patients recover faster in the comfort of their own homes. Care can be tai...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Business Source Type: news