Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Health Insurance/Care Overhaul, Pt.7 – Streamlining communication and accountability.

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The next topic treated here is resolving our current health insurance/care crises is ‘regulatory changes’. These are changes are intended to improve on efficiency by streamlining medical care communications between different coordinating physicians and specialists. By removing the current barriers and obstacles in our health insurance/care system and by requiring those medical providers to make the effort, the expected result is for greater safety and less confusion during transitions. An effective system is expected to greatly reduce the gross inefficiencies inherent in our current health insurance/care system. Putting this all together promises to be a comprehensive task. It is formulated here under the term ‘Accreditation’. In order for the earlier steps to function, there needs to be a robust infrastructure which provides the foundation of the resources that will be required. The attributes required are six-fold:

1) All the pertinent patient information needed to make value decisions on medical care will need to be made available at the actual 'point of care’ on demand at any given time.

2) When patient care transitions incorporating multiple providers are involved, all participating parties must be effectively coordinated and managed. Examples of such parties would be: physicians, specialists, surgeons and hospital facilities.

3) ‘Cross-accountability’ may be the single-most important measure in shoring up efficiency. It is also the least popular among the institutions. Of course, these parties are the most qualified to rate each other but regard their own well-being to supersede valiance. There are very strict mores against exposing a fellow professional in the medical field. But, as the Commonwealth Fund has warned us, this needs to be affected soon if we are ever to get a handle on this major problem. Their direction is that we need a means to hold our health care providers accountable in a collaborative way to guarantee a good health insurance/care system.

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