Healthcare trends that will move forward regardless of Obamacare

Healthcare trends that will move forward regardless of Obamacare

While Congress continues to debate and rework the nation’s health care plan, many uncertainties linger. As of July 2017, the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, or any revision of the ACA remains unclear. Regardless of what happens with the ACA, however, there are a number of healthcare trends that will continue to move forward.

A recent article published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), 3 Health Care Trends That Don’t Hinge on the ACA, outlines the trends in the healthcare field that have nothing to do with the status of Obamacare:

  1. We are getting older. As we get older, our healthcare costs increase. According to the HBR, “In 1960 the median age for men and women in the U.S. was 29.5; it is now 37.9, and in the next 12 years will exceed 40.” An aging population will demand more efficient healthcare services that are delivered in a more cost-effective manner.
  2. Technology is increasingly impacting healthcare delivery. The HBR reports that “nearly nine in 10 physicians regularly employ EHRs” today. Electronic health records (EHRs) enable independent physicians to access patient information more efficiently. A significant aspect of this trend is the need for interoperability, the ability of EHRs to talk to each other seamlessly.
  3. Life science discoveries will continue to improve our quality of life. Laboratory research and discovery will continue, regardless of government decisions about the ACA. HBR cites two factors contributing to this trend: “the availability of personal health data, and the plummeting cost of integrating massive health data sets in the cloud.”

At Elation Health, we continue to stay on the forefront of these healthcare trends, developing new tools for independent physicians that enable them to access patient data through EHRs, optimizing the use of cloud-based data, and making available the personal health data that is so important to improving the quality of healthcare for their patients.

The future of Obamacare revisions may be uncertain, but we stay focused on providing the technology independent physicians need to move forward with these healthcare trends.