This issue comes to press a few weeks after the debt ceiling debate left the Medicare program out of discussions on the US government’s future fiscal health. This was a critical omission at a time when almost 5,000 baby boomers a day are joining Medicare. The costs of healthcare in the private market, where real employer and employee costs of health insurance have risen from 13% of median family household income in 2000 to 25% in 2021, and the costs of Medicare, which will require $8.8 trillion in taxpayer support between now and 2030, suggest that it will be hard to leave the economics of healthcare out of future discussions.
One potential means of reducing the cost of healthcare is the use of lower-cost providers. Barak Richman and Bob Kaplan describe how services provided by advanced practice nurses can be billed as services provided by physicians, eliminating this potential source of efficiency in the market.
Billing and administrative costs have been identified as one of the single largest opportunities for waste reduction in the healthcare system. A conservative estimate puts that opportunity for savings at $250 billion annually. Kelly McFarlane et. al. suggest that the billing codes assigned to physician services are needlessly complex, proving one potential path forward to address this cost issue.
Alberto Galasso and Hong Luo take an innovative look at liability in the medical device industry, proposing that liability mitigation should be considered as a feature in product development.
Swati DiDonato and Vittavat Termglinchan explore the emerging IOT framework for the care of aging populations. They outline several different dimensions to characterize the development of this technology, including technical, analytic, data architecture, and business architecture questions that must be addressed before this technology can be meaningfully deployed at scale.
Finally, the University of Miami healthcare conference always brings together a great lineup of speakers. This year’s conference was no exception. We’re pleased to include a summary of the conference in this issue of HMPI.
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