ACC CV SUMMIT: Why do you I have to change? Trends and Solutions in Cardiovascular Care Delivery

Friday, January 17, 2014 | MedAxiom

Suzette Jaskie, President & CEO for MedAxiom Consulting proclaimed, “The healthcare world around us is evolving at a monumental pace.” Partnerships, collaborations, mergers, reductions, cost cutting, population growth, physician shortages, the data revolution, and more. Yes, your head should be swimming and you should be preparing your organization for positive changes. She gave the attendees at the ACC Cardiovascular Summit five reasons why change is good. These reasons include:

1. Changing Payment Paradigm
2. Industry Consolidation
3. Rise of the Consumer - Transparency
4. The Data Revolution - Performance
5. Looming Physician Shortages

The majority of cost cutting in hospitals is being executed on a tactical level, not a strategic level. However, there has been a shift from tactical to strategic cost cutting in recent months. Some unique and creative partnerships and collaborations have developed and are both offensive and defensive strategies. The question becomes, can the healthcare industry organize to make VALUE FOR PATIENTS the central objective?

Ms. Jaskie offered eight solutions for healthcare organizations to focus on to optimize patient value…and creating the ability to compete in the future regardless of the number of ACO’s or value based plans. These solutions include:

• One care standard. Period.
• Programs, not services
• Value-based distribution of program’s services
• Embrace consumerism
• Leverage Integration
• Value Performance Management
• Physician Leadership
• Operations mastery

At the root of all these solutions is the organizational culture, which should be the foundation of the patient experience, and thus, creating value for patients. No one is perfect, no program is perfect at all of them, and it will take an effort to work on most of them. Ms. Jaskie closed with the encouraging statement, "This is cardiology... innovating, raising the bar, succeeding... is what we do!"