The Healthcare Change Conundrum

I’ll be the first to tell you that there are a lot of changes happening in healthcare. At MGMA, the President said that Healthcare isn’t changing, Healthcare has changed. I agree wholeheartedly that Healthcare has changed, but I’d argue that healthcare is still changing even more. I don’t see a stabilization of things coming in the forseeable future.

What’s ironic is that while so many of the regulations and reimbursement structures are changing in healthcare, so many other parts of healthcare are resistant and even fearful of change. However, that provides what I call the healthcare change conundrum:

There’s definitely a culture of fear when it comes to changing anything that we do in healthcare. In many ways it’s a very appropriate fear and that fear has served us well. The fear can drive us to inspect the drugs and treatments properly before using them and causing more damage than good. We have good reason to be cautious in healthcare.

While caution can be valuable, that caution often paralyzes us from doing anything. As I say in the tweet above, doing nothing has its own consequences. We often don’t think about it that way, but it’s absolutely the case.

My favorite example of the problem of doing nothing is that it prevents you from even thinking 5-10 steps down the road of what will be possible. Many of the population health initiatives and value based care programs would not even be possible to consider in a paper world. How do you run a report of at risk patients in the paper world? You don’t. You couldn’t even think about the idea. Now it’s a simple query to your EHR.

We have to be leery that we’re not causing more harm than good as we change things in healthcare (As I’ve discussed multiple times.). However, we shouldn’t be so paralyzed that we’re not willing to change anything. Doing nothing has its own risk and could stop us from discovering a multitude of future benefits that we couldn’t ever dream possible.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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