Читать книгу Do No Harm - Matthew Webster - Страница 14

The roots of why there has been such radical transformation in healthcare the last few years are on a few different levels. One of the key drivers is to reduce healthcare costs, which have been escalating. One of the avenues of that change has been as a result of the Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act (PPACA), which President Obama signed into law in March 2010. There were a few key provisions within this bill. The first provision was to create a Patient-Centers Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), which would compare clinical effectiveness of medical treatments. The goal was to help the healthcare profession determine the most effective strategy for providing treatments. The second provision was a penalty that prohibited payments to states for hospital-acquired infections. Other provisions included reduced payments for hospital readmissions.¹⁷

As a result, hospitals were more incentivized to stay clean and to improve what they were doing—not just in the cleanliness, but how care would be administered. This required rethinking through many of the processes, changing hospitals' approach to technology, and catching medical issues more proactively than reactively. It would involve rethinking how they currently approach treatment and becoming more proactive. It would also involve the use of more connected technology and devices to treat and monitor patients, not just when they come to doctor's offices, but also remotely so conditions could be detected prior to onset of a more serious illness. America needed to revolutionize its way of caring for patients. Doctors would have to rely on a new generation of medical devices for their transformation effort—devices that would be internet connected to provide real-time capabilities or more real-time capabilities than they already do.

America responded as it always does by being innovative and thoughtful about the approach to help the medical community achieve its goals. The new generation of medical devices not only met the goals needed by physicians, but it jump-started continual changes in the technology. These new devices helped to lower per-patient costs, improve efficiency, provide better response care, offer greater convenience, and provide a better overall patient experience. In short, the existing value we are getting from medical devices will fuel the desire for more medical devices. But let us look at these positives, because within the desire for positive changes lies the seeds of the challenges related to the security of internet-connected medical devices.