For whom are hospitals built?
For the health of patients or for the financial health and convenience of its operators and staff?
For anyone who’s been a patient at both a large, acute care hospital and at a customer-centric facility, for example, at a surgery center, there is often, very often, no comparison in the overall experience.
I’m not saying that some, as in the case of very ill patients or those requiring broad resources to be diagnosed, don’t belong in what are today large, general acute care hospitals. However, advances in technology make it possible to either scale-down the size of facilities or to bring services to the patient.
The future does not bode well for large hospitals. Instead, just as those operators need government restrictions on the establishment of smaller, customer service oriented physician owned hospitals, they will soon be battling competitors who will transform delivery to a patient centered scale.
Soon, the patient centered “medical home” might just be the patient’s home.
How is your practice going to cope with that? Start strategizing now.
