Essay Sample on The Healthcare Industry: Challenges in a Rapidly Changing Environment

Introduction

The healthcare industry has been facing many transitions, which poses challenges to various small and large organizations. Certainly, the highly evolving regulations by the government, innovations in technology as well as the expectations of the patient creates a new environment where running a medical practice would not only incorporate the aspect of patient treatment. There are, therefore, some of the main challenges faced by the healthcare industry, including the cybersecurity, invoicing and payment processing, price transparency, patient experience, and even the effective model of payment.

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Concerning the issue of cybersecurity, it is due to the sensitive information which is collected by the organizations in healthcare. Thus, the industry has been a cybercriminals' prime target. For instance, in the US healthcare sector, there have been so many cases of data breaches as well as the exposure of the patient records (Mooney, 2012). Therefore such a threat is likely to continue since many providers of healthcare are acting slowly to respond against the threat.

Another challenge involves invoicing as well as payment processing. The payment collection has always been challenging since patients are becoming more responsible for the larger percentage of healthcare medical bills. Price transparency is also another primary challenge. This makes up the reason for the consumers in failing to pay their financial responsibility (Mooney, 2012). Thus this has compelled the patients to research the service pricing for the various health systems before deciding on the practice they can book an appointment with.

The effective payment model is also another issue where there have been challenges in the implementation of the new models as well as the process of monitoring within the existing systems. These cases arose due to the payers' and patients' demand for the new models of payment, which encourage the care providers in service coordination and promotion of preventive care.

Approaches to the Challenges

There are some of the possible measures which can be put in place to reduce the challenges facing the healthcare systems. The healthcare institutions should not only rely on the firewalls to defend against such kinds of intrusions. This is because the hackers can get into the network and remain dormant without any detection (Gibbs, 2011). Besides improving on the cybersecurity, the providers of healthcare can think of outsourcing their processes involving sensitive patient information, for instance, billing and invoicing to a HITRUST-certified party having the resources which are dedicated to ensuring that the systems are fully protected against the cybercriminals.

Besides, to meet the expectations of the patient and also improve on the user experience, the healthcare providers ought to come up with the patient-friendly billing statements. Therefore, paperless statements need to be offered as well as various payment options, for instance, the use of echeck, credit cards, among others through the patient portal online, in addition to utilizing the latest technologies of payment, e.g., text-to-pay and mobile.

The healthcare providers also demand a streamlined patient experience, and this will help them in resolving most issues, concerns, and questions. For the organizations which are providing various services in various locations, it is essential that all the employees can access the information of the patient, which is up-to-date from a certain centralized location. This will not only help in avoiding fatal mishaps like drug interactions but also deliver a better patient experience.

Finally, for the issue of the effective models of payment, healthcare providers need to check on the trends concerning such systems. This can be done by looking at the large organizations or the early adopters, for instance, Medicaid who are fine-tuning and also testing the new models of payment to know how best they can reduce the cost as well as improving on the patient's outcome.

References

Gibbs, V. (2011). An investigation into the challenges facing the future provision of continuing professional development for allied health professionals in a changing healthcare environment. Radiography, 17(2), 152-157. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1078817411000083

Mooney, G., & Andersen, T. F. (2012). Challenges facing modern health care. In The Challenges of Medical Practice Variations (pp. 192-200). Palgrave, London. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5278805/