With the healthcare and healthcare IT worlds undergoing massive and revolutionary change right now, what trends are most significant? Most illuminating? Most intriguing?
Once again this year, we the editors of Healthcare Informatics, are delighted to be able to share with you, our readers, some of the top trends we’re seeing evolving forward out in the industry right now, in our annual “Top Ten Tech Trends” cover story package. The 10 trend stories will be published online throughout this wek.
Many things are happening right now. Among others, legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in 2015 is going to be pushing physicians who accept Medicare payment to enter into alternative payment systems or participate in a new program called the Merit-based Incentive Payment System, or MIPS, which, when it goes into effect next January, is set to revolutionize physician incentives. Meanwhile, more hospitals, medical groups and health systems are entering into risk-based contracts and participating in value-based payment systems. And yet IT strategy and implementation are lagging behind what is needed.
And what about data analytics? The leaders of pioneering U.S. patient care organizations are beginning to make real inroads into the effective leveraging of data analytics to support accountable care, population health, bundled payments, and other forms of risk-based and value-based contracting and payment—but even those pioneering organizations are early in their journey.
Could the leveraging of the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard move the U.S. healthcare industry forward on its sorely needed progress into true interoperability? What about the potential for a privately sponsored national patient identifier? And what role will physician documentation reform, to support clinical data exchange and satisfy growing consumerism, play in all this?
All these trends and more are covered in the following set of feature articles. At a time when keeping up with the most significant trends shaping the U.S. healthcare industry is more important than ever, we are pleased to be able to offer this package of feature articles, with analysis of these trends and input from true industry thought-leaders, for you, our readers. We hope this story package will be helpful to you in your organization’s journey forward into the new healthcare.
—The Editors of Healthcare Informatics
