Healthcare HQ™ Trendwatch: Doctor Demand, Telehealth, and Ransomware
Healthcare HQ™ Trendwatch spotlights trending developments in the medical industry and offers strategic insight for data optimization in response. Here are three key trends Healthcare HQ™ has been tracking.
Trend 1: Doctor Demand Declined During the Pandemic
The Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 highlighted the real possibility that medical resources could be overwhelmed. The general thinking was that there would be too many sick people and not enough doctors, nurses, and hospital beds. Ensuing national quarantine and social distancing efforts mitigated that concern in most instances, but there was a second, unexpected result: people stopped seeking medical help.
Ten weeks after the United States declared COVID-19 a national concern, researchers conducted a cross-sectional study of emergency departments in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina. Examining data from 24 providers and five healthcare systems, they found that patient visits to emergency rooms declined between 41% and 62%. Additionally, emergency treatment for serious medical conditions also declined to dangerous levels, including a 23% decline in heart attack patients, a 20% decline in stroke victims, and a 10% decline in patients suffering hyperglycemic crisis.
A related study by the Department of Veterans Affairs reported comparable findings, and this news had experts worried. Given the known prevalence of conditions like heart disease and stroke in America, it was unlikely that people simply stopped suffering, and most likely that people suffered at home instead of coming into the emergency room.
A similar phenomenon emerged in preventative care. One 2020 study showed that screenings for cervical, breast, and colorectal cancer, as well as mammograms, colonoscopies, and Pap smears dropped by 80% and more. Beyond the human toll on patients, providers felt a significant financial crunch, with NPR reporting over a million healthcare jobs lost and the healthcare industry experiencing an 18% annualized decline in spending.
Data Optimization Strategies for Healthcare Providers:
Enhance tracking and efficiency of absentee patient monitoring, especially for high-risk conditions such as heart attack, stroke, and hyperglycemia. A Power BI dashboard that isolates and reports on these patients in a single at-a-glance window enables quick response and proactive contact. Separately, employ practices to improve patient satisfaction and remove obstacles to seeking care. Targeting efficiencies in KPI reporting for healthcare can give instant access to process functions such as office scheduling, maintaining viable third-available appointments, and advance warning of factors that might lead to subpar patient experience.
Trend 2: Telehealth Has Become a Healthcare Standard
One significant and lasting consequence of the 2020 pandemic was to establish telehealth as a mainstream delivery model for healthcare. Although telemedicine had been growing steadily before 2020, it had been mostly pushed to the fringes of provider services. The pandemic changed that permanently.
In 2019, telehealth as an industry generated an estimated $5.6 billion in annual revenue. Then the pandemic hit and previous restrictions on remote-access healthcare that had been obstacles to growth were quickly eliminated. Harris Williams, a global private equity investment bank, noted several key changes at the time: Medicare expanded telehealth visit reimbursement beyond rural communities and increased reimbursement to equal that of an in-person visit, private insurers followed suit, and the U.S. government lifted the requirement that providers conduct an initial in-person exam before electronically prescribing a controlled substance, significantly boosting telehealth in psychological and behavioral health sectors.
The scale of adoption was striking. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s telehealth ambulatory care system surpassed all of 2019’s visit volume in just two days of 2020. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts saw its telemedicine-related claims increase by more than 5,100% over its 2019 monthly average. What began as a necessity has since become a preference for many patients and providers. Healthcare organizations that have not fully instrumented their telehealth operations with real-time data are leaving meaningful insight on the table.
Data Optimization Strategies for Healthcare Providers:
Implement ROI tracking specific to telehealth expenses. The temptation in a high-growth environment is to invest carelessly in pursuit of growth and watch expenditures outpace results. A data visualization tool based on root-cause analysis metrics will point clearly toward which investments have future value and which ones do not. Target analysis to factors that influence the new normal of telehealth, including patient adoption, provider availability, and payment and reimbursement parity between telehealth and in-person visits. Trending on overall reimbursement should account for whether the organization is fee-for-service, value-based reimbursement, or a mixture of both.
Trend 3: Healthcare Data Breaches Are on the Rise
“You need to take us seriously. If we’ll release on our blog student records/data, I’m 100% sure you will lose more than our price what we ask.”
That was the message administrators received from hackers who were blocking access to servers used by the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco. The ransomware attack came in June 2020, while the department was working to help create a vaccine for COVID-19. The situation was eventually resolved, but not without cost, and it was a stark reminder that any health organization, anywhere, is a potential target.
Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the pandemic accelerated the ransomware industry, making high-value targets of universities, hospitals, and labs with access to sensitive research and vaccine data. Even before the pandemic, ransomware attacks on healthcare were rising sharply. In 2009, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, only 18 health organizations were involved in criminal data breaches. By 2019 that number had risen to 429, an increase of 2,283%. That trend has not reversed. Healthcare providers face increasing daily risk of compromise to the critical patient and operational data they maintain, making data security and compliance a frontline concern rather than an IT checkbox.
Data Optimization Strategies for Healthcare Providers:
Stay current with data best practices continuously. Making data actionable to multiple audiences while maintaining security requires choosing infrastructure that ensures data is encrypted in transit and at rest, enforcing access controls through row-level security, and keeping data security at the core of your optimization approach rather than bolted on as an afterthought. Implement a regular data security review that seeks to ensure the latest best-practice compliance standards for your data architecture. Assess your structure for any security-related issues, establish risk levels for each potential issue, and make informed decisions about mitigation. You can perform this review in-house or bring in a partner to guide your team in creating safer architecture models.
Additional reporting for this article was contributed by Joshua Klenk, MCSE, MCSA
Three Key Thoughts
“Given the known prevalence of conditions like heart disease and stroke in America, it’s unlikely that people simply stopped suffering — and most likely that people suffered at home instead of coming into the emergency room.”
“Telehealth is not only here to stay, but now on a trajectory that is making it the preferred method for provider services in America.”
“Ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations increased by over 2,000% in the decade before the pandemic and have continued to accelerate since. Healthcare providers face increasing daily risk of compromise to the critical data they maintain.”
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