We Need to Fix COVID-Damaged Care Sites and Give the Country Better Care and Universal Coverage in the Process

By GEORGE HALVORSON The COVID crisis has shown us clearly that major portions of the American care system are extremely dysfunctional and some are now badly broken. We need to put in place a cash flow for American health care that can help our care sites survive and ultimately thrive, and we need to put that approach to save the sites in place now because a vast majority of hospitals and medical practices are badly damaged and some are financially crippled and even destroyed by their response to the crisis. We have learned a lot in the COVID crisis that we need to use now in building our next steps and our collective response to the crisis. The COVID crisis has shown us all that our care sites do not have good patient data, do not have good patient linkages, usually do not have team care of any kind in place, and most are so dependent on current piecework fee volumes from patients that they quickly collapse financially when that volume is interrupted. We should be on the cusp of a golden age of care delivery that uses all of the best patient support tools to deliver continuously improved care — and we now know that the piecework way we buy almost all of our care today will keep that golden age from happening for the vast majority of American patients for the foreseeable future until we change the way we buy care. We need to buy care in a way that both requires the use of those tools and rewards caregivers and care teams when they use them. We need a depend...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: COVID-19 Featured Health Policy OP-ED George Halvorson Medicare Advantage Medicare Advantage for All Source Type: blogs