Futurescan

I just received my annual survey from the American College of Healthcare Executives on Futurescan.  This survey requests the input from executives as to the future delivery of health care from 2014 to 2019.  This year's survey focuses on population health, physician integration, provider affiliations, reimbursement, IT, patient care and efficiency. 

As I answered the questions, I had a pretty good feeling as to our level of readiness in each area.  In population health, we have already established partnerships with community partners; we are ensuring stronger coordination of care among those same partners and long before 2019, we will be a controlling entity for a complete continuum of care.  Within the next two years, our physicians will be heavily involved in patient centered medical homes; and by next year, we will be actively engaged in a pay-for-performance initiative with our physicians to better align financial incentives.  Within the year, we should be further along with our potential alliance between the three western Maryland health systems, as well as clinical data integration system wide.  Lastly, we continue to be focused on being a highly reliable organization; continually expecting the unexpected, but being resilient enough in working to contain the unexpected. 

Being in a state of readiness for the many changes occurring in healthcare is a very good position to be in going forward.