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In January 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services set a goal to tie 50% of the Medicare payments to value or quality by 2018. This transition has put physicians on the frontlines of healthcare, as they play a major role in the value-based roadmap of an organization.

Now, in a space as vital as healthcare, the predictive ability could be gold- be it diseases, the cost of care, or even the technology trends that the future would bring us. Considering the present-day scenario, the ability to predict the future cost of care, out of everything, could change the way we view healthcare. Especially as healthcare moves to put quality in care on the forefront, predicting the cost of care for every single patient could be a huge plus.

Consider a 57-year old diabetic man who missed his past two HbA1c tests. Given that diabetes runs in his family, and that his blood glucose is more than 8.1%, he is quite likely to have a stroke, or worse, a cardiac arrest. Perhaps if someday, that man googles ‘symptoms of stroke’ at 11:30 pm on his phone as the fitness band on his wrist records his escalating heart rate, there’s a good chance that he will end up in the emergency department the next morning.

An ideal state for two-way interoperability would be wherein all systems in the U.S. have adopted the industry standards. However, the current scenario is a far cry from what it should be. Digitalization in healthcare has been fairly new and while the industry has been slow to fully adopt health IT, two-way interoperability has suffered because of it.

Over 95% of hospitals have a certified EHR technology in place today, yet EHR integration still remains a sticking point, resulting in reduced efficiencies, higher costs, and negative outcomes. As of 2015, only 65% of hospitals could make use of electronic clinical information, but only about 4 out of 10 hospitals could integrate data into their EHRs.

Innovation needs to be at the center of value-based care as it always has been in the past. Healthcare has evolved from long and hard years of experimentation and breakthroughs. Whether through pioneering technology or sheer staggering efforts, healthcare has accomplished things that most people would have thought miraculous just a few generations ago. Medicine has played a major role so far and we know we have miles to go from here.