While the overall economy has become much more volatile in 2022, the U.S. health sector seems to be continuing on a course of escalating prices towards double-digit increases in commercial health insurance premiums. Healthcare price increases are contributing to increases in core inflation but may be resistant to efforts by the Federal Reserve to drive down inflation. Healthcare has always been counter-cyclical, suggesting that prices could remain high even if the overall economy is driven into a recession.
While some of the factors driving up the price of care are inputs costs, such as the nursing shortage elegantly described in this issue, other factors relate to an underlying business strategy of consolidation and market power. This issue of HMPI addresses some of these factors and their implications for consumers, providers, and care delivery.
Price transparency has been held out as an option for individual consumers to drive down costs, but in this issue we find that patients are under-educated about the opportunity for savings in the market, even in the wake of new federal price transparency rules.
Innovation has long been held out as a potential path forward to improve the value of healthcare for consumers. We have several perspectives on this challenge, from assessments of telehealth to a novel strategy for organizational innovation.
Most healthcare organizations lack meaningful feedback on performance. In this issue, we report on an innovative approach to text-mining of social media to provide more actionable feedback to care teams.
Rural health care was the theme of our 2022 BAHM student case competition, and in this issue we feature the competition’s winning presentation, which proposes to improve healthcare in rural Oklahoma through a novel alliance structure across provider organizations. Our featured case also focuses on rural health, in this case a national digital health care strategy for India.
This issue also looks at the impact of COVID on population health – the use of state incentives to influence COVID-19 uptake in the U.S., as well as the impact of COVID on the care of some of most vulnerable patients, pediatric cancer patients.
In closing, I would like to thank the Ludy Family Foundation for their recent generous donation to HMPI. This gift will help us to continue to take on critical topics to inform decision-making in the global health sector, and at no cost to the authors.
And finally, thanks to you, our readers, for your continued support of our journal.
Kevin Schulman, MD, MBA
Acting Editor in Chief, Health Management, Policy and Innovation (HMPI)
President, Business School Alliance for Health Management (BAHM)
Professor of Medicine, Stanford University