New York City’s Mount Sinai Health System gets it. Will you?
As I’ve written over the past year (see my most recent book, The Impending Death of Hospitals — get your complimentary copy, here) the future of healthcare doesn’t include hospitals as we know them. Surgical cases will move to outpatient facilities and, if you’re a surgeon or an anesthesiologist/CRNA, you’d better prepare for that future now.
Witness Mount Sinai’s decision, announced late in May 2016, to plow under its 865-bed Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital and replace it with a 70-bed facility.
And, just last week, it was reported that Mount Sinai’s Mobile Acute Care Team program, which delivers hospital-quality home care to patients at risk for readmission, has reduced readmissions, increased patient satisfaction, and cut costs by almost 20%.
Technology and innovative care are beginning to replace in-office physician care, in-hospital surgery, and in-hospital patient care. Sooner or later, hospitals will be small institutions for the most ill and, perhaps, the most indigent. Or, they will be parking lots.
As with any instance of creative destruction, the bad news for hospitals is good news for physicians and entrepreneurs willing to take the risk to play an oversized role in the future of healthcare.
Patients aren’t going away. It’s the locus of care that is changing. Be there or be square.
