The Coming Healthcare Revolution

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) estimate 2024 healthcare expenditure levels to be $4.9 trillion, representing 17.8% of the entire U.S. economy. Despite its gargantuan size, or perhaps because of it, the U.S. healthcare system (Healthcare Inc.) has resisted transformation. It still operates largely as it has for the last century as a very fragmented, high-cost, revenue-driven, centralized, hospital- and physician-centric system for treating acute illness and injury. As currently configured, Healthcare Inc. emphasizes volume-based care delivery, engages in profiteering, tolerates unacceptable levels of medical error, exploits perverse economic incentives, under-invests in preventive care, and mightily resists change. As a society, the U.S. pays far more for healthcare services than other high-income countries but achieves far worse health outcomes. This can not continue. The Coming Healthcare Revolution: 10 Forces That Will Cure America's Health Crisis is your guide to understanding how the nation's largest industry is disrupting and rewiring itself in real time. Written by David W. Johnson and Paul Kusserow, professional healthcare advisors operating at the intersection of healthcare economics, policy, strategy, and capital formation, this book identifies and describes how five top-down macro forces and five bottom-up market forces are transforming the healthcare industry from the outside in. The macro forces are demographic determinants, funding fatigue, chronic pandemics, technological imperatives, and pro-consumer/market reforms. The five market forces are whole health, care redesign, care migration, aggregators' advantage, and empowered caregivers. The authors detail how new technologies and superior business practices foster human-machine collaboration in ways that ease caregiver burden, delight consumers, enable preemptive diagnostics, offer 24/7 service provision, and promote well-being. The Coming Healthcare Revolution is a must-read resource for professionals and organizations seeking to understand and react to the paradigm-shifting forces revolutionizing the U.S. healthcare industry.