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 There were major reductions in staff, overhead and outright elimination of tasks that served no purpose or had been replaced by digitalizing the industry.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'

Accountable Care Organizations: The Next IRS

The invention of the ACO is associated primarily with one man – Dr. Elliot Fisher, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at Dartmouth Medical School.

Fisher’s statement that he can invent rules for assigning patients to doctors and doctors to hospitals is no more or less logical or useful than the statement by the inventors of the Kevin Bacon game that they can assign a Kevin Bacon number to virtually any actor.

Elliott Fisher, shown here with Dartmouth Atlas founder Jack Wennberg, is credited with coining the phrase Accountable Care Organization.

By Kip Sullivan, October 2010

The “accountable care organization” (ACO) is the latest fad in American health policy. It remains an unknown concept to the vast majority of the public, including most doctors, but it is all the rage among health policy analysts as well as lawmakers who sit on heath policy committees in Congress and in state legislatures.

Although the assumptions used by ACO proponents to justify ACOs have been around since the dawn of the HMO movement, the ACO label is relatively new. It was invented late in 2006 during a discussion at a public meeting of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (Medpac). The seminal article announcing the concept appeared in December 2006. By 2009 the ACO had become so fashionable among congressional Democrats it was mentioned in all three draft health care “reform” bills prepared by Democrats during the first half of 2009 (two of those bills originated in the Senate and one, the Tri-Committee bill, was written in the House). The ACO movement’s crowning achievement to date is the inclusion of ACO provisions in the final “reform” legislation – the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)

The Affordable Care Act created a new kind of “cooperative” health insurance arrangement heralded by supporters of health reform.  The co-ops were founded on the idealistic belief that community members could band together to create health insurance companies that would be member-driven, service-oriented, and would not have to answer to shareholders or turn a profit. But the 23 co-ops that were created had significant start-up costs, no experiential data upon which to set premiums, generally had to pay extra to lease physician and hospital networks, and had few people in the companies and none on their boards with insurance experience.  The idealism has quickly faded.  After receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in government start-up loans, most co-ops are surviving now on what remains of more than $2 billion in federal “solvency loans” and on the promise of future “shared risk” payments that are likely to produce only a fraction of the revenue co-ops have booked.

The History and Definition of the “Accountable Care Organization”

The definition of “ACO” bears a striking resemblance to the definition and history of “HMO,” a term coined in 1970. As was the case with the HMO, the ACO has been promoted primarily for its alleged value as a cost-cutting tool. Like the HMO concept, the ACO concept is vague and has multiple definitions which vary depending on who you ask. Like the HMO, the ACO is defined as an entity that will be “held accountable” for providing comprehensive health services to a defined population. As was the case with the HMO, “accountability” for cost will allegedly be achieved by shifting some or all of the insurance risk now born by insurance companies and public programs like Medicare to providers, and “accountability” for quality will allegedly be achieved by subjecting providers to report cards. 

The principle difference between HMOs and ACOs, at least for the foreseeable future, will be their size. Whereas HMOs, like most insurance companies, generally have enrollees in the hundreds of thousands, the ACO has so far been defined as having a much smaller number of enrollees, possibly as few as 5,000 (that’s the minimum number of Medicare beneficiaries who must be in an ACO according to PPACA’s Section 3022). The other major difference between HMOs and ACOs, at least for the near term, will be the extent to which they bear insurance risk. Whereas HMOs function like insurance companies (they bear 100 percent of the risk that the premiums they charge will not be enough to cover all necessary services for their enrollees), ACOs will bear little or no insurance risk for the first few years. However, judging from published papers by Elliot Fisher and other proponents of ACOs, proponents want ACOs eventually to bear all insurance risk, just as HMOs have.

ObamaCare Co-ops: Cause Célèbre or Costly Conundrum? 

By Grace-Marie Turner and Thomas P. Miller Overview     

Portions of this blog were taken from publications from PHNP, Physicians for a National Health Program