Employer Healthcare Strategies

Despite ongoing headlines about lost and stolen user data, it's not for lack of spending on the part of America's consumer-facing industries. Healthcare tops the list.

Since the start of the new Millennium, Medicare has been over-paying for home healthcare services all over the United States. This year, it's time to pay the piper.

The ACA calls for 1% reimbursement cuts for home services in 2017, following successive cuts in 2014, 2015, and 2016. This comes at a time when the need for home healthcare is only increasing.

While no one can predict the future, financial forecasters tend to think that future retirees' healthcare costs will continue to grow until they take up all of their Social Security dollars.

2016's retirees see about 57% of their SS checks going to healthcare (pretax). But healthcare costs grow by 5-7% annually, while Social Security provisions increase by only 2-3%.

Since 1975, more than 60 million Syrian refugees have fled the unrest in their home country. The US has accepted only a handful.

Since the start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, request for sanctuary within the United States has increased. But the US only accepts 3,000-5,000 refugees each year, after 18 months of intense applications and vetting.

Most Syrian immigrants who are eventually admitted, are relocated to upstate New York, where local health systems are being crippled by the complex needs of this challenged population.

One of the most important recent healthcare reform changes is to the way healthcare providers approach EHR, or Electronic Health Records.

Every patient has an EHR. It is a detailed record of all sorts of health and treatment data, meant to prevent mistakes and save lives. Each EHR, along with similar paperwork requirements like The Physician Quality Recording System (PQRS) must be completed before a patient can be seen by a physician.

And while this digital bookkeeping may create a more thorough record of care, it's adding a lot of wait time in many practices.

The Healthcare sector reported more data breaches than any other industry in 2015. An overview by IBM provides a closer look at industry data loss, here described as an "arms race between adversaries and defenders".

The Retail sector used to be the source of the most numerous data breaches, but many of those problems were corrected last year. Most of healthcare's losses occured through theft of currency or extortion tactics, involving financial insitutions and hospitals.

America's Hispanic population is growing 3x faster than the national average. This sea change in US demography has widespread effects, upon health care (perhaps) more than any other sector.

There are currently 10 million Hispanic people who have access to health care in the United States, with a projected 10 million to come over the next decade.

There are a bunch of researchers out there who study how regular people associate price of health care with quality of health care. As it turns out, most people think that today's health care is expensive and not very good.

While that may sound like bad news to you and me, it's actually good news for those trying to innovate new sources of low-cost care.

The thinking is that if people generally associate high quality care with high prices, they won't take advantage of low-cost care options, even if they are of a very high quality.

Everyone knows that doctors get paid plenty of money... Right? Some physicians don't agree.

Some doctors are struggling to make ends meet, and are forced to see as many patients per day as possible.

This doesn't benefit physician or patient, and the case for better pay for doctors has has even more strong points.

Kicking and screaming, the healthcare industry is being forced to evolve. Many have anticipated an Uber-style renovation of familiar healthcare models, in the pursuit of customer-first care.

Take insurer Oscar, for example. The experience of finding a doctor and selecting health insurance options with Oscar has been compared to the ease of calling an Uber.

The healthcare industry is very diverse, so broad recommendations must also be very general. But in every case, industry thinkers call on the next generation of healthcare providers to be customer-centric.