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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.

Quite recently, I stumbled upon an article that talked about how pro-basketball, had embraced technology and one of the pioneers of this revolution were the Golden State Warriors of Oakland.  

It is the season of miracles and what better place to look for one than in a hospital, where one moment a man is given the gift of life and another moment a woman gives birth to life. Samuel Johnson’s accolade to the medical profession, “healthcare is the greatest benefit to mankind,” stands true even in this day and age. The kind of life-saving operations in place today is nothing short of a miracle for people from centuries ago, who could not tell a common cold from pneumonia, let alone treat it. The smallpox vaccination scar, a sign of medical sophistication for the twentieth century, could very well be mistaken for a “devil’s mark” by people from the previous centuries.

Most of you have watched Peter Jackson’s epic saga Lord of the Rings. It’s been almost 16 years since the first Lord of the Rings movie was released, bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s  mesmerizing world of hobbits, elves, dwarves, and orcs to life. I was rewatching it recently and couldn’t help but see parallels to healthcare’s present conundrums.

Looking forward to the year ahead is one thing, but if we are to have a balanced perspective on the changes in health reform, we must also learn from the year gone by. The year 2017 has been a year of uncertainties and opportunities. The election of Donald Trump ushered in a new era for the US healthcare industry, which has spent years adapting to the erstwhile U.S. President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA). Despite the potential policy changes in Washington D.C., the painstaking and challenging work of shifting to value-based care continues.