It’s been a while since I’ve written, and my excuse is typical, I’ve found any number of work projects overwhelming my time to sit, and write, and blog. One such project was the composition of Psilos Group’s 2011 Outlook on Healthcare Economics & Innovation, which I put this together with one of my business partners (and awesome blogger) Lisa Suennen (you can check out Lisa’s blog, Venture Valkyrie, here, where she proves to be a much more consistent correspondent than yours truly).
For those of you that come to these pages for the pop-culture commentary (more to come on that too, I promise), you may note that I manage to get a few words in on healthcare and investing, and after all, this is what I spend the majority of my time on. With that, the Psilos Group report outlines what we see as some of the most significant impacts on healthcare investing of the implementation of the new health reform law.
Chief among these are:
- The reality that we should expect a doubling, and potentially a tripling of the individual health insurance policy market, which will result in a dramatic shift in the relationship between insurers, employers and consumers. In many cases, employers will simply stop buying group health insurance, leaving the consumer to directly purchase coverage (partially or fully funded by the employer) on their own through a newly established public or private health insurance exchange.
- Health insurance plans will have to become superior consumer marketing and service organizations to thrive and survive, acting more like Starbucks or Apple if they are going to expand consumers’ trust in their brands and grow while their sales process evolves from a primarily business-to-business market towards a much larger business-to-consumer market.
- Health plans will have to proactively manage clinical and financial risk through active care coordination for those with chronic illnesses. This dovetails with the need for such organizations to make a quantum leap forward in their commitment to utilize modern information technology to change their business dynamics.
- Provider organizations who seek to become Accountable Care Organizations will have to learn to think and act like next generation insurance companies (financially, clinically, technologically) to avoid becoming a repeat of yesteryear’s physician practice management debacle.
If these subjects are of interest to you, the entire Psilos 2011 Outlook on Healthcare Economics & Innovation can be found by clicking HERE. Let me know what you think.
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