by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | October 20, 2017
From the October 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
HCB News: What challenges does your facility have either at the regional level and/or at the national level?
GA: Two things. In a macro sense, health care is economically very challenging between declining reimbursements and pharmaceutical and medical supply inflation. We have to do our best to grow and expand our services while lowering our costs. Regionally, Seattle is a boom town which is good and bad. Good because it brings in top talent, bad because it has meant rapid increases in housing prices and overall cost of living. It also means increased traffic congestion, which makes it more difficult to get to work. We continue to work with the city, county and university on affordable housing and transportation. The people of Puget Sound have invested in light rail, and the opening of a new station across from the medical center has helped. We need to continue working toward solutions to help people afford to live here and get to work.
HCB News: Any concern about the ACA repeal?
GA: Hospitals, like any other industry, prefer predictability. If we know the regulations, we can plan more effectively. The proposed repeal created a huge uncertainty in our business and the marketplace. It makes it difficult to financially plan for the future if people we were caring for will not have coverage in the future. For example, with the ACA coverage expansion, we know we can provide services that are more effective and timely for people with diabetes and obesity. If they’re not covered in the future, they will continue to struggle to manage their disease. If people are covered, predictably, we can help to ensure a healthy workforce to drive the economy.
Another important current event is implementation of MACRA – the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, which was not contentious and was overwhelmingly passed by Congress. It is driving improvements toward preventive care, screening and population care that will do a lot in keeping people healthy.
We know a lot about our patients and MACRA drives us to use that information to identify different patient populations, where risks lie, what services they receive, what services they should receive. The only way we’re going to effectively decrease overall health care spending is to connect those dots. Identifying patient populations, risk factors, and figuring out how to keep people from getting sick will do much more to reduce health care spending than managing costs on an incident level. There’s only so much you can do to reduce the unit cost of each care episode.
