Vision

Build and deliver technology and services that reduce the administrative costs of delivering and managing healthcare.

It is critical to understand the current business processes, and its strengths and weaknesses. This will help us identify opportunities to save healthcare administration costs.

The key questions that this blog will address are:

Understand Current State
1. Who are the key players in “administering” healthcare?
2. What are their objectives?
3. How are they incentivized?
4. What business processes do they follow?
5. What technology do they use?

Proposed State
1. How do we change the incentives to motivate change?
2. What business processes are the low hanging fruit for effecting change?
3. How do we use technology to achieve changes in the business processes?
4. How do we set up structures to ensure that there is constant effort to improvize?

The blogs will initially start with Third Party Administrators and then address the other stake holders who can help reduce the technology costs. One key point to remember is that healthcare administration is a very small component (< 15%) of healthcare costs. Efficacy of care, sociology of delivering care, and life styles are much bigger contributors. An article on the CNN website illusrtated that bad habits including excess salt, sugar, alcohol, smoking, and pollution contribute to more than a trillion dollars in healthcare costs. Excessive salt alone leads to heart disease and strokes which costs roughly half a trillion dollars.

This goes back to the fundamental doctrine in systems engineering. Simply creating efficiencies will not create any significant benefits. It is important to keep remembering that even if all of the administrative costs are eliminated, it will not have the same impact as life style improvements.