While politicians and consumers debate the effects of healthcare reform on the patient population, industry leaders are turning their attention to how it will impact the business of healthcare.
In a special report published yesterday, editors from FierceHealthIT, FierceHealthcare and its sister publications looked at how healthcare reform will affect a variety of key industry areas, including health information technology, pharma, medical devices, emergency care and more.
The Fierce report listed health IT among the winners because in part because the U.S. Supreme Court decision to uphold reform preserves federally funded pilot programs for technologies including telemedicine, mHealth and remote healthcare.
The law could also be a boon for entrepreneurs, writes Mitch Rothschild, CEO of doctor-rating site Vitals and co-founder of its parent company, MDx Medical.
Among those who will "rock the business landscape," as Rothschild put it in the VentureBeat article:
- Agencies, publishers and media will see sales grow as health insurance companies market themselves as consumer-friendly brands for the more than 25 million Americans buying health insurance on their own.
- Data crunchers as health organizations pursue evidence-based medicine. Rothschild sees opportunity for small businesses that help organizations track treatment data and apply financial analysis to procedures and processes.
- Healthcare innovators, including scrappy startups, will "transform a lumbering, expensive and highly inefficient industry into in a lower-cost system that yields better results," he says.
As reform's provisions go into effect, providers face educating the public about it. Setting up a strategy team and an online resource were two suggestions for doing that in a recent FierceHealthcare post.
Though some states have declared all-out war on what they call "Obamacare," fully repealing it would add $109 billion to the national deficit in the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office's updated numbers released Tuesday afternoon.
To learn more:
- read the VentureBeat article
- check out the Fierce slideshow