This week I’ve been at the MGMA Annual Conference in San Francisco. It’s been a very interesting event with a ton of people that really want to improve healthcare. I’m always impressed by these practice administrators passion for their work and their desire to do what’s right for patients.
While I love their passion, I can’t help but feel that there’s a clear lack of innovation at MGMA. More specifically the practice executives and not the MGMA organizations itself. Instead of trying to figure out and participate in new business models that will take their practice to the next level, most healthcare practices seem focused on optimizing their existing practice.
Sure, many of them are focused on various government regulations like MACRA. In fact, I’d suggest that most of them are too focused on government regulations. No doubt that’s part of why healthcare executives at MGMA aren’t focused on innovation. They’re too busy dealing with government regulation to be able to have time to sit down and think how they could take patient care to the next level or create new business models.
The two places I do think we see some interest in innovation is the shift to value based reimbursement and the change to direct primary care. The problem with value based care is that people don’t really know what that’s going to be. Most are in wait and see mode to see where it’s all going to go. Direct primary care is quite interesting to many, but that largely only applies to primary care and many feel it’s limited in which primary care practices can and should participate (I know that many people firmly disagree with this idea).
I guess that means that MGMA stands in somewhat stark contrast to many of the other healthcare conferences out there. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. We need to optimize our current processes as well. I just think that many of these medical practice executives would benefit from more effort talking about where healthcare is heading in the future.
It’s great that patients can now schedule an appointment on a physician website. However, are practices ready for appointments to be auto scheduled based on personal device data or through a simple request through Amazon’s echo? I know that’s ahead of the curve, but it’s not that far off either.