David Sandman, president and CEO of the New York State Health Foundation, and David Peknay, director of S&P Global Ratings Services, discussed 2017 healthcare trends at the New York Hospitals & Medical Facilities Summit last September. Here are some of their predictions from their discussion:
David Sandman
Sandman: The era of the big shiny new hospital is over. More and more care is moving to the outpatient setting. Smaller healthcare facilities have to become affiliated with larger ones. Healthcare is becoming more and more about the consumer, as it should be.
Peknay: Hospitals are only one component of the system. Healthcare organizations are investing in outpatient care, urgent care and home care. They have to make themselves competitive and attractive to insurance companies by creating a broad network of services.
Healthcare facilities need to cater to the dollars that people have in their control, such as retail pharmacy and urgent care.
Sandman says Millennials will bring higher deductibles and consumers making more choices. They will expect more transparency in care.
He says it’s virtually impossible for consumers to find out the actual price of services and that’s not going to be acceptable to Millennials who look up on Yelp and crowdsource all their buying decisions.
David Peknay
Peknay agrees that there needs to be a “Consumer Reports”-like guide for Healthcare. He thinks we are moving in that direction but slowly.
Sandman says there are more than 1,600 measurements used in the healthcare industry to measure quality of care but they don’t mean anything to the consumers. He says the industry needs outcome measures that normal people can relate to such as: Did they clean their hands? Did they give correct meds? Did they connect the patient with a community doctor?