After two years of managing through a global pandemic whose intensity has ebbed and flowed, but which has in any case put tremendous pressure on patient care organizations and their leaders, what has become clear? One thing that has become clear is that clinicians and other healthcare professionals are feeling the stress as never before; that patient care organizations remain at least somewhat financially vulnerable; but also, that new perspectives have been opened among all the stakeholders of U.S. healthcare—from purchasers to payers to providers of all types, including hospitals, medical groups, and health systems.
This year, as we present our Ten Transformative Trends package, the landscape around patient care organization operations is as unsettled as ever. Staffing shortages among nurses, IT professionals, and numerous other professional cadres, are undermining many initiatives in patient care organizations. At the same time, the dramatic advance of telehealth-based care delivery in the early months of 2020 has led to the embracing of hybrid healthcare delivery healthcare system-wide, benefiting both patients and healthcare professionals. Meanwhile, precision medicine is finally becoming a reality as an element in patient care, at least among more advanced hospital-based health systems.
At the same time, the entire landscape around accountable care organization (ACO) development is particularly unsettled right now, with private ACO development zooming ahead, even as certain policy, payment, and market uncertainties are bedeviling the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). The good news, though, is that both providers and payers are learning how to better do care management and population health management. And, in the wake of massive upticks in Medicaid enrollment during the pandemic, Medicaid officials and health plan leaders are collaborating with provider leaders to really look at the whole person whose care is being managed in Medicaid programs nationwide.
Not surprisingly, despite a bit of discouragement based on the early overhyping of artificial intelligence, AI really is being adopted in patient care organizations—but one algorithm at a time. That trajectory has turned out to be quite different from what had been anticipated.
All those trends and more are the subject of our Ten Transformative Trends, as presented in this issue. There is so much going on right now that patient care organization leaders could be forgiven for feeling gobsmacked by the welter of crosscurrents evolving forward right now in U.S. healthcare. We hope that this cover story package will help to clarify this complex landscape for our readers. All the best to our readers in this time of intense change and challenge!
—the Editors of Healthcare Innovation
