It also lists 10 areas that the author recommends health systems target for maximum cost improvement: Manage the healthcare cost of your own workforce, eliminate subscale services, optimize service line spend, maximize IT spend, flex the workforce, find the waste, reconsider capital spend, reduce the cost of leakage, reduce bad debt and avoid potential costs.
My biggest takeaway from this article is that it provides further support of the fact that business as usual in healthcare is no longer an option. Everyone in this industry, including MedSpeed, must look closely and objectively at their entire operation to not only understand true costs but also to find areas that are operating at suboptimal levels so they can be addressed.
I remain optimistic about the future of healthcare but I don’t for a second believe that succeeding in this environment will be easy for any of us.