“… Each year, the ACHE [American College of Healthcare Executives] surveys community hospital CEOs to identify the top challenges their organizations are facing. Below are the top 10 issues identified by hospital CEOs in 2016. The results reflect 383 CEOs’ responses.
1. Financial challenges
2. Government mandates
3. Patient safety and quality
4. Personnel shortages
5. Patient satisfaction
6. Access to care
7. Physician-hospital relations
8. Population health management
9. Technology
10. Reorganization (e.g., mergers, acquisitions, restructuring, partnerships)
CEOs also ranked specific aspects of the top three categories they found most pressing. CEOs could choose as many as desired. Here are the top three for each.
Within financial challenges
1. Medicaid reimbursement — 63 percent
2. Increasing costs for staff, supplies, etc. — 60 percent
3. Reducing operating costs — 55 percent
Within government mandates
1. CMS regulations — 67 percent
2. CMS audits — 57 percent
3. Cost of demonstrating compliance — 51 percent
Within patient safety and quality
1. Engaging physicians in improving the culture of quality/safety — 59 percent
2. Engaging physicians in reducing clinically unnecessary tests and procedures — 57 percent
3. Redesigning care processes — 48 percent …”
The foregoing excerpt from the article by Ayla Ellison in the March 2 2017 edition of Becker’s Hospital Review entitled “10 most concerning issues for hospital CEOs” (http://bit.ly/2lnrAed) clearly implies the urgent need for a Cloud Healthcare Appliance Real-Time Solution as a Service (CHARTSaaS) reference architecture (RA) compliant IT solution. Not only would it be effective in addressing the cited aspects regarding the top three concerns, but also it would address the other top-ten concerns as follows:
4. Personnel shortages: by reducing the need for personnel to execute administrative and clinical processes reliably and for IT personnel to design, develop, deploy and manage new IT applications, a.k.a. apps;
5. Patient satisfaction: by enabling the cost-effective implementation of apps for access and application via any/all device form factors including tablets and phones;
6. Access to care: by enabling cost-effective deployment of continuously operating apps to monitor physiological data for automatic clinician notification of pending pathology and scheduling of clinic or emergency visits;
7. Physician-hospital relations: by offering timely creation of apps designed by clinicians to leverage installed electronic health record (EHR) systems but to supplement physician cognitive capabilities without additional computerized physician order entry (CPOE);
8. Population health management: by enabling creation of apps to access EHR and other clinical case evidence databases for similar cases and creation of demographic- and pathology-oriented patient record cohorts a.k.a. populations;
9. Information Technology: by providing an IT tool bench for collaborative app design, development, deployment, management and modification without procurement of new capital- and operations-intensive systems and applications; and
10. Reorganization (e.g., mergers, acquisitions, restructuring, partnerships): by facilitating legacy system/application interoperability through creation of cloud-based apps accessible via secure portal software.
Please validate these assessments to your own satisfaction by reviewing the details of CHARTSaaS and the CHARTSaaS RA in these presentations, and then by imagining a CHARTSaaS-enabled IT solution:
Healthcare providers and their patients will benefit significantly from appreciating and then applying a CHARTSaaS RA-compliant IT solution. To do so will mitigate medical mistakes (currently the third leading cause of patient deaths, per Makaray and Daniel, http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139), thereby minimizing patient adverse events; and also will optimize clinical case outcomes while maximizing the cost-effectiveness of care and treatment and accelerating the accrual of medical knowledge.