Thursday, April 11, 2013

Physicians Office Underlying Driver Of Affordable Care Act

Long term community health care planners taking a holistic view of the changes taking place in the delivery across America can't help but think physician's office.  The physician's office is where the primary management of an individual's treatment regimen is decided.  This is the one place in the entire system of care delivery that an individual is being served.  Yet , an undesired effect of the employer paid insurance plan has been a stagnation of reimbursement for the physician office visit.

The (ACA) Accountable Care Act facilitates changes in the existing health insurance market shifting the focus from the employer back on to the individual.  Now the health care system provides more individualized care shifting from a model of delivery designed to please the employer.  The elevation of the primary care physician and the individual patient is an important theme emerging to the forefront of health care delivery in America.

Left to expand without direction the health care system's strongest delivery involved segmented  connections of aggressive treatment for acute symptoms.  Disconnected, competing health treatment facilities attacking a late stage disease process to provide evidence for a hefty investment in a technological machine and barrage of potent medicinal remedies.   The result being the bulk of a health care dollar is used on these out of control symptoms of chronic disease.

To effectively treat these symptoms of chronic disease the office physician's realized the need to shift toward a continuous connection of prevention and scheduled interventions across a persons life time. 
Office physician groups determined that to be fiscally responsible money being thrown at the later stages of chronic disease needs to be shifted to earlier intervention.  This looks like a whole different product to the employer groups who were used to having a larger say in how invested money was spent on the population being served.  More frequent patient visits to the physician's office is an important theme emerging to the forefront of health care delivery in America.

To effectively treat chronic disease earlier and save the health care system money the groups of office physicians would need to get hospitals to improve communication.   The end result would be a collaboration in care delivery between the physicians office and the hospital of the patients choice.  The physicians office group embraced the changes in technological communication to forge a productive tool capable of producing a  measure of control in real time across multiple care delivery settings.  This new tool is the (EMR) electronic medical records.  Electronic medical records placed the hospital stay back in the physicians office as portable data.  Your health care providers reviewing your latest medical visits through the physicians office computer is an important theme emerging to the forefront of health care delivery in America. 

So the changes we are seeing in the health care delivery setting involve:
- the shift from employer to individual
-the shift from go to the doctor only when sick to ongoing visits
-the shift to having all your health visits available on the computer

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