Article summary: Healthcare HQ™ Trendwatch spotlights trending developments in the medical industry and offers strategic insight for data optimization in response.
Topic: Healthcare HQ
Assoc. Keyphrase: Healthcare industry trends
The Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 highlighted the real possibility that medical resources could be overwhelmed to the point of inability. The general thinking was something along the lines of, “There’ll 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% (41.5% in Colorado up to 61.5% in New York).
Additionally, emergency treatment for serious medical issues also declined to dangerous levels, including:
A related study by the Department of Veterans Affairs reported comparable findings, and this news has experts worried. 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 suffer[ed] at home instead of coming into the emergency room.”
What’s more, a similar phenomenon exists in preventative care and doctor visits outside of hospitals. For instance, one 2020 study showed that screenings for cervical, breast, and colorectal cancer, as well as mammograms, colonoscopies, and Pap smears dropped by an astonishing 80% and more.
In addition to the human toll on patients, providers are feeling a financial crunch as well. NPR reported over a million healthcare jobs lost, and the Washington Post documented an 18% annualized decline in healthcare. That decreased spending has providers reeling, prompting the Post to make this ominous warning: “The healthcare industry is suffering a historic collapse in business that is emerging as one of the most powerful forces hurting the U.S. economy and a threat to a potential recovery.”
Data Optimization Strategies for Healthcare Providers:
A more hopeful consequence of the 2020 pandemic has been to shine a bright light on non-contact medicine, specifically telehealth, as a viable means for treating patients. Although telemedicine is not new and has been growing steadily, before March 2020 it had been mostly a practice pushed to the fringes of provider services. No more—and it probably never will be again.
In 2019 telehealth as an industry generated a very healthy, estimated $5.6 billion in annual revenue and boasted a projected five-year growth rate of 24%. Then the pandemic hit and remote medicine was an immediate beneficiary of the new world order. Previous restrictions on remote-access healthcare that had been obstacles to growth were instantly eliminated, at least temporarily. Harris Williams, a global private equity investment bank, reports:
These factors and more are fueling widespread—and fast—adoption of telehealth as an everyday medical function. Examples of this are popping up in places like the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s (UPMC), where its telehealth ambulatory care system surpassed all of 2019’s visit volume in just in two days of 2020. Additionally, in March 2020, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts saw its telemedicine-related claims increase by more than 5100% over its 2019 monthly average.
This indicates that telehealth is not only here to stay, but also now on a bullet-speed trajectory that could possibly make it the preferred method for provider services in America—with or without a pandemic looming in the background.
Data Optimization Strategies for Healthcare Providers:
“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 grammar-challenged 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 feverishly to try to create a vaccine for COVID-19. The tense situation was eventually resolved, but not without cost—and the reminder that any health organization, anywhere, is a potential victim of the next attack.
Bloomberg Businessweek reports, “In some ways, Covid-19 has turbocharged the ransomware business that has proliferated, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe, over the past several years. The pandemic has made high-value targets out of universities, hospitals, and labs with access to data that are used to analyze new potential treatments or document the safety of vaccine candidates.”
Still, even before the pandemic, ransomware attacks on healthcare were already rising exponentially. 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 skyrocketed to 429—an increase of 2,283%.
That unhappy trend means healthcare providers face increasing daily risk of compromise in the critical information that they keep.
Data Optimization Strategies for Healthcare Providers:
Additional reporting for this article was contributed by Joshua Klenk, MCSE, MCSA
1. “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 suffer[ed] at home instead of coming into the emergency room.’”
2. “Telehealth is not only here to stay, but also now on a bullet-speed trajectory that could possibly make it the preferred method for provider services in America.”
3. “In some ways, Covid-19 has turbocharged the ransomware business that has proliferated, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe.”
How to Compare Business Intelligence Software
“Trends in Emergency Department Visits and Hospital Admissions in Health Care Systems in 5 States in the First Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US.” JAMA Intern Med. Published online August 3, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.3288. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2768777
Christina Farr. “Hospitals saw fewer heart attacks and strokes as the coronavirus pandemic struck — and nobody knows why.” https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/04/coronavirus-pandemic-lowered-emergency-room-visits-why.html
“A Sharp Decrease in Cancer Screenings.” https://www.healthline.com/health-news/important-cancer-screenings-have-decreased-during-covid-19#A-sharp-decrease-in-cancer-screenings
“Historic financial decline hits doctors, dentists and hospitals — despite covid-19 — threatening overall economy.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/04/financial-distress-among-doctors-hospitals-despite-covid-19-weighs-heavily-economy/
“As Hospitals Lose Revenue, More Than A Million Health Care Workers Lose Jobs.” https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852435761/as-hospitals-lose-revenue-thousands-of-health-care-workers-face-furloughs-layoff
“Telehealth: Proving its Value in the COVID-19 World” https://www.harriswilliams.com/article/telehealth-proving-its-value-covid-19-world
Kartikay Mehrotra. “How Hackers Bled 118 Bitcoins Out of Covid Researchers in U.S.” Bloomberg Businessweek. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-08-19/ucsf-hack-shows-evolving-risks-of-ransomware-in-the-covid-era
“Number of entities involved in U.S. healthcare data breaches from 2009 to 2019.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/972220/number-of-entities-involved-in-health-data-breaches-us/