The MPR staff has recently recognized a 6-month milestone in our conversion to a blended credentialing process.  What we realized in reviewing the challenges and accomplishments we’ve faced during the journey was insightful.  Many times you don’t know what you’ve accomplished until you take a moment to turn around and look back down the path behind you.  So recently when I had the rare opportunity to sit with some of my credentialing subscriptions and journals, I was not surprised to see the path of health care has experienced it’s own journey.

Health care has seen its share of challenges and accomplishments. Rather than review all the accomplishments (which would be many), I thought I might take a moment to review the challenges that lay ahead.

1.  Conversion of physicians to electronic health records.  One of the articles I read from the Health Tech NextGeneration reported 83,000 physicians nation-wide have provided proof of implementation to the federal government.    The gathering of patient information into automated systems is well under way.
2. Removing the responsibility of records-sharing from the patient.  The Medical Society of Sedgwick County has been a driven leader in this initiative.  Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are proliferating exponentially in the U.S.  HIEs are designed to ensure continuity of care by allowing your medical records to travel between physicians, hospitals, pharmacies and labs.
3. The rise of the genetic signature as part of the health care culture.  It has been predicted that within the next decade, state of the art medical care will include tailoring your therapy to your unique genetic signature. If you have not had the opportunity to study genetic signatures I would encourage you to do some digging.  It is fascinating what is scientifically possible.
4. Moving the responsibility care and outcomes from the provider location to the consumer location.  This is reported as perhaps the biggest transformational change to the health care delivery system and will be enabled through telemedicine, mobile apps, and remote patient monitoring.
5. The rise of health avatars.  Did you know you have a health avatar in your future?  Your health avatar is a trusted online resource used to sort through the conflicting information a consumer needs to manage his/her own health.  It will help patients do everything from stick to an exercise program to take their blood pressure and report it to a central database.
6. The change in physician compensation from fee-for-service to fee-for-outcomes.  Your physician will be paid to keep you well.  In this ideal future, the physician will spend more time with you planning how to keep you healthy rather than addressing problems when you are ill.

Wow.  I don’t know where this new path will take us, but I do know I am looking forward to experiencing all that health care has to offer.  Now if we could just find an avatar for credentialing.  Life would be great!