Over 40,000 players attended the J.P. Morgan healthcare conference for 2019. Becker's Hospital Review reported:
Over the last decade, there has been a massive level of consolidation with hundreds of hospitals and thousands of physician practices being acquired every year. While more mergers and acquisitions will still happen, this stunning and fundamental restructuring of healthcare delivery has taken place and there is no turning back. This is likely the single biggest shift relative to how healthcare is structured in this country that will take place during our lifetime, and it barely gets mentioned.Private equity underwriters (PEU), great acquirers, barely get mentioned as a cancer on our economy and workplace. Becker's noted how nonprofit hospitals act like PEUs:
Spectrum Health has a $100 million venture fund. Providence St. Joseph's Health announced a second $150 million venture capital and growth equity fund. Mayo Clinic Ventures has returned over $700 million to their organization. Jefferson Health has a 120-person innovation team focused on digital innovation and the consumer experience, partnering with companies to build solutions.My consumer experience has been that I pay more each year for less healthcare coverage. I've paid out of pocket for the few health services I've consumed. Friends work for large healthcare companies, nonprofit and for-profit, and many feel abandoned by executives misplaced priorities.
Bad managers only know how to act with data and often do so without an understanding of variation. Thus they made decisions that waste time, money and harm people.
... the lifeline for every health and healthcare hub will be actionable data. Applied analytics is a boring term that is actually gaining traction and starting to dislodge buzzwords like big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence relative to its importance to healthcare providers.What happens when healthcare leaders are unable to tell the difference between correlation and causation? How much harm will they cause?
Employees did not show up in the future of healthcare. I predict healthcare will get much worse under these PEU management practices. Nonprofit healthcare systems have downed the language/strategies of the greed and leverage boys. This is most concerning. A dark future awaits.
Update 3-27-19: Two large government health insurers, Centene and WellCare, announced a deal today. An activist with ALS offered "... this is how they do business—deny, deny, delay, and then people give up." So much for platforms and big data.