The Long and Winding Road

Love the Beatles.  Especially love it when they sing with prophetic clarity around our healthcare systems ultimate journey, home.  Pretty amazing the stops made along the way, but given the patient population demographics that have cratered the old paths, it seems almost poetic that we are on the precipice of returning to the place where most care givers operated in the first place.

"The long and winding road
That leads to your door
Will never disappear
I've seen that road before
It always leads me here
Lead me to you door"  The Beatles (1970)

So a central question is, can the reimbursement models rally in time to pave that road before it washes out?  Another involves patient access and how well served a non-technical and aging population will prevail against higher mortality rates when services and care givers are even further spaced out and tapped for time?

Greg Slabodkin relayed this morning in Health Data Management that there is growing legislative support for telemedicine in congressional circles, with Senator Angus King from Maine one of those leading the charge.  

Given where EHR's are with integration strategies lagging all across the continuum of care and the lack of real incentives to make the system work, it makes sense that influential folks are waking up to the fact if we are going to push care back to a home setting, we had better leverage the technologies in place to help facilitate the migration as best as possible.

I am not saying where we are headed is good or bad.  Only that there is some irony that when we left home for better care, not many would have predicted we would be back so quickly, and scrambling to find any way we can to keep the advances we have made along the way before the demand depletes the current funding strategies completely.

We have such a great opportunity to build a system that integrates the best of our advancements in every area of medicine and technology, and my hope is that lawmakers and regulators get on board quickly in order to facilitate an orderly transition- a transition back home from our long and winding road.