Healthcare Industry Awaits New Agenda
“The year 2008,” according to a new report by Deloitte, “will be a period of guarded status quo for the health sciences industry, as providers, health plans, and life sciences companies wait for a new President and Congress to set the nation’s health care agenda for the next four years.”
Rising costs will affect companies across the board, and remain perhaps the single most important feature of the industry. “U.S. health care costs are growing at 8 percent per year, an unsustainable rate that will be forcing every employer to make a crossroads decision in the next 12 to 36 months.”
“Increasingly, there will be intramural tensions as dollars grow tighter, technologies change how things are done, and investors look for disruptive innovations that improve quality and efficiency. Physician-hospital tensions will increase. Employer-health plan tensions will increase.”
Consumerism is on the rise, Deloitte says, largely as a byproduct of more and more individuals paying for all of their own coverage. “As individuals begin to shoulder a larger share of the health care cost burden, they are becoming increasingly engaged in their health care decisions and purchases.”
Technology will provide new opportunities for cost-cutting, Deloitte says.
Advances in information technology and increased information exchanges are enabling improvements across the entire value chain.
Other topics covered by the Deloitte report include:
- Wellness and prevention
- Industry convergence
- Talent management
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
