The Revolution in Magazine Processes "How not to fall behind in an era when everything you think you know might be wrong."

The title could have just as well read

The Revolution 

in 

Health Processes

Conventional print magazines, newspapers have weathered a sea-change in their business model.
And so has medicine and health process.

Health care financing, and administration also are struggling to change even as our current medical system is overwhelmed with increased expenses.  The similarity between magazine process and health process are remarkably alike.

Prominent news publishers, such as the Washington Post, New York Times and many others went out of business at the same time re-inventing their 'product' in a more efficient manner.  In some cases ownership shifted quietly behind the scenes. There were major reductions in staff, overhead and outright elimination of tasks that served no purpose or had been replaced by digitalizing the industry.

Even as this is occurring health organizations are burdened with daily organizations while being mandated by government, CMS, the Affordable Care Act, Insurers, and expansion of new covered benefits such as remote monitoring, telehealth and mobile health care.  The uptick in  expenditures for health IT is overwhelming many, both large and small.  There is no room for error. During the past five years some large institutions spent millions of dollars to purchase EHRs only to find they could not perform as advertised. Providers, and hospitals did not know or have experience in systems that were new and untested in a real world setting.

Health care operated mostly on a cash basis until the birth of managed care, capitation, and other obtuse forms of risk management.  In health affairs risk management used to have to do with risk of disease and/or treatments. Insurance companies were required to have an actuarial basis for setting premium rates against history of their insured disease risks.

Today this risk is carried not just by the insurance company, it has been shifted to hospitals and providers. Other calculations are being considered such as quality of outcomes, measured by re-admission rates to the hospital. The latest in the quirky world of health high finance is the 'accountable care organization. (ACO).

The name was coined by Elliott Fisher as a philosophical term during it's germination period.  Theoretically the organization that saves the most gets a 'kickback' a larger reward incentive than the rest of the providers/hospitals.

The health care company of 2005 is gone. its processes, procedures and priorities would be nearly unrecognizable today. In fact, the medical practice that existed in 2010 is gone too. In a period of accelerated transformation, nothing is more striking than the scope—and pace—of change in the processes through which these companies engage their customers (patients)  The very terms physician and patient devolved into provider and consumer. Physicians are no longer generalists or specialists they are primary care providers. It’s not just peripheral or incremental change, either. What the industry is going through in 2015 is a revolution in processes. In advertising, content creation, marketing, back-office functions and everything in between, what was done just a few years ago has been rendered obsolete, as new ways to interact with and serve stakeholders push the old ways into the trash bin. 

What’s changed is that technology is transforming every single phase of the business. It’s ubiquitous. It’s impacting the business on a wholesale level.”  It’s a new world of “VUCA,” says Lenny Izzo, group president of legal media at ALM. “That’s an acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. It’s an old military term

Providers and hospitals have become 'punch-drunk' much like boxers and football players suffer from TBD or traumatic brain disorder.

Uncertainty comes in the form of new competitors. It comes with the decline in traditional branding-based display advertising, and the rise of new formats like cost-per-lead sales and programmatic advertising. Complexity comes in the form of tying together new expensive technologies that cross email, web, billing, production, ad-management, and content creation. Ambiguity comes in the form of not having the expertise to evaluate expensive new systems, and sometimes not knowing the right KPIs. Volatility? How about not knowing whether a new software system that cost $1 million will be relevant in 18 months?

This report is an on-the-ground look at process change in magazine media companies and how it’s affecting, well, nearly everything, from organizational structure and staffing needs, to assumptions about efficiency and newly essential skillsets. We’ll look at overall philosophies and approaches, and then explore, mainly through case studies, what publishing companies and executives are actually doing. 

Radical changes in process are driven by several things, of course. But mostly, it’s a function of two things: emerging technologies that enable new methods of serving markets, and a quest within companies for efficiency driven by economic necessity.

The revolution in health is not just in health IT, it includes changes in medical group administration, payment reform, relationships between providers, hospitals and providers, referral patterns and a new dynamic between regulators, licensing boards and providers of health care.

Interestingly, for health provider and magazine publishers, there’s a significant paradox in process change. Because the business model is in a seemingly permanent state of flux, and because technologies become obsolete so quickly, both types of companies find themselves betting huge amounts of money on unproven ideas. “Maybe the paradox of process is that you’re forced to be hyper-efficient in the things you understand, to finance what you hope is our future,” 

Note: Much of this article has been taken word for word from anaticle found on FOLIO  an internet magazine about the publishing business. It was a simple task to substitute health for magazine or publishers.. A true example of 'convergence'