Getting Rid of Waste in The US Healthcare System

By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist#TheIncrementalist

On this episode I talked to Emad Rizk, MD President and CEO of Cotiviti (@Cotiviti) who are providing analytics reshaping the economics of healthcare. Emad has had extensive experience working with payers, hospital systems, government, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies, that offers a unique lens to help solve some of the hard problems in healthcare.

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We discuss the challenges in healthcare finance that lacks data to make accurate determinations of risk and ultimately cost. As Emad describes, other countries are not doing any better than the USA in their pricing and understanding of costs with much of our increased cost arising from the higher available choices and speed of access that is central to the healthcare system in this country. As he points out:

The healthcare system is not broken

Disparity in Data and Interoperability of Data

We discuss the challenge of COVID19 has had on the healthcare system and the fragile finances of many healthcare institutions (the AHA estimating an average $50.7 billion in losses per month), and a shocking $600-900 Billion of waste per year, money which as Emad points out could be going towards more and better care.

Listen in to hear how Emad describes the potential solutions, some of which has been driven by COVID19 that did not create fault lines in our system but rather opened up existing faults and exposed them for everyone to see. Solutions come from the better sharing of data with public private partnerships and more robust and accurate payments that ultimately to

“turn waste into beneficial utility for medical treatment”

About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.

This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.