Will Population Value Data Destroy the Healthcare Industry
Howard A. Green, MD
Dermatology Associates, PA, Palm Beach, FL
There’s nothing new about ‘population health.’ Physicians practicing medicine (notice I didn’t say practitioners practicing healthcare) have utilized population health studies or ‘clinical studies’ for the better part of two centuries. Physicians practicing medicine with patients observed, recorded, tabulated and revealed their findings on charted variables contributing to diagnostics, treatments, prevention and palliation which were subsequently reviewed by peers and publicly published. These studies ranged from just a single patient observed over a short period (also known as a case report) to decades of observations on thousands of patients such as the Framingham Heart Study.
What’s a bit different today in population health is that we have the ability in real time to compress, tabulate and reveal 200 years’ worth of epidemiological and charted patient health information in seconds. The result of interoperable digital compression and rapid revelation and clinical reapplication of preventive, medical, surgical and palliation data according to all charted variables will be a rapid improvement in the cost and quality of clinical outcomes or the Value=Outcomes/Costs of practiced medicine. Thus, population health will benefit patients and their physicians.
While the value of the practice of medicine with physicians and their patients will be improved by the application of interoperable population health, the healthcare industry will be disrupted and devastated.
The healthcare industries which would be displaced by interoperable population health data revelations include the five highest market cap ancillary industries of healthcare, and they’re not willing to downsize or be disrupted. In essence, these industries have deemed themselves ‘too big to fail.’ These five industries would be devastated due to the forced consolidation and downsizing from the outcome or value data revealed by population health via integrated and interoperable EMR/EHR (electronic medical record) (electronic health record) and billing systems.These industries remove the largest share of healthcare dollars from both patients and their physicians. In addition, these industries receive massive taxpayer subsidies or wavers from federal regulations. These industries represent the largest combined donors in America to our congress people and the administration. The industries which would be damaged by population health’s clinical outcome revelations and are preventing the implementation of interoperable population health are:
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