Employer Healthcare Strategies

We live in a time of incredible upheaval for the healthcare industry. The growing need for specialists and the expansion of nationwide insurance coverage has put great strain on the system.

Many companies are practically starting from scratch. Tech.co identifies five pressure points ready for industry disruption.

A new hospital rating system has been introduced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Not everybody is happy about it, especially after debut ratings scored some major national hospitals at 2 or 3 stars out of 5.

2016 has been a year of data breaches. Whether it be your local healthcare provider or a major political candidate, nobody seems to be able to hang onto your private data.

Within the past two years, most American healthcare providers have experienced more than one data breach. During that time, they've paid an average $2.2 Million to cover the repair and recovery costs.

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.