The Journey

The American healthcare industry is faced with thinning margins, skilled labor shortages, shifting consumer preferences, powerful new competitors and a host of other challenges both old and new. Health systems and hospitals are responding by recalibrating their strategic priorities and finding that successful patient financial engagement is...

Deep pockets, industry expertise, meticulous research and the quest for investment gains make Private Equity a powerful force for growth and innovation in healthcare. Healthcare providers can learn a lot about the future of the industry - and their place in it - by studying Private Equity investment trends.

Last week, in Authentic Patient Engagement, Pt. 1 - What It Is and How to Achieve It, I began this 2-part series exploring the modern patient’s heightened expectations of healthcare providers, along with the Loyale solutions that providers are leveraging to deliver it. This week, we’ll continue to examine patient expectations while digging more...

This is the first of a two-part series of articles seeking to define patient engagement in a more holistic and actionable way. Today, we’re taking a look at Patient Engagement from the patient’s perspective. Next week, we’ll dig deeper into the provider’s side of the relationship.

Consumerization in healthcare has taken a long time to gain critical mass, but newly proposed price transparency rules designed to increase hospital competition and reduce costs may force the industry to a tipping point. Though CMS’s rules fall well short of achieving their stated objectives, innovative hospitals are turning this challenge -...

Patients are struggling to pay their portion of healthcare costs, discouraging care and placing a crippling bad debt burden on healthcare providers. These financial stressors call for new approaches to better engage with empowered patient-consumers on their terms.

Borrowing from the principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution’s “We The People”, the U.S. Healthcare Industry is facing unprecedented transformation driven by a similar principle, “We The Patients”. Successful healthcare providers are finding ways to leverage existing assets to meet the high expectations of empowered patient/consumers.

Chronic inefficiencies in the U.S. healthcare system are largely the product of fragmentation within the industry’s clinical, administrative and financial systems. Platform-enabled system integration has proven to be an essential remedy for providers determined to compete in the new healthcare economy.

First developed in the early 1970s as clinical data repositories, major developments in the early part of the 21st century propelled the evolution of EMR systems to keep pace with ever-expanding industry requirements. Though these systems offer many benefits, their considerable operating and financial costs have created blind spots that...

Big changes are under way in the American healthcare industry, with what should be positive outcomes for patients and providers in the long-term. Attracted by the industry’s gigantic share of the U.S. economy and the enormous potential for gains through innovation, at least one major U.S. bank has joined the ranks of venture capitalists,...