Challenges in Healthcare

Dr. Jitesh Chawla comments on the challenges in healthcare

As the picture below depicts, healthcare is a complex and challenging web of co-depenedant systems. In this series of posts, Dr. Jitesh Chawla brings along solid, on-the-ground experience and insightful perspective about the many challenges facing the healthcare industry.

Some of the biggest challenges around healthcare include cost, access and quality.

Cost: Spending on new medical technology and prescription drugs has been cited as a top contributor to the increase in overall health spending. Such advances can lead to consumer demand for more intense, costly services even if they are not necessarily the best treatment or most cost-effective. On a consumer level, this translates into high healthcare premiums.

Access: US healtcare continutes to suffer from lack of quality healthcare professionals in underserved areas. However there are other aspects of access, such as timely access to diagnosis, reports and personalized healtcare services.

Quality: Medicine is as much art as it is science hence making it difficult to putting a tag on quality. There is a lot of subjectivity in diagnoses and treatment. The first steps in tackling the quality challenge is getting medical experts together to reach a consensus on which metrics work best, when they should be measured and set benchmarks for quality improvements. Healthcare organizations regardless of the size, patient panel can successfully balance the cost-quality pendulum by finding more effective ways to drive productivity and manage capacity in existing operations.

Dr. Jitesh Chawla is a Family Practice Physician with a focus on quality service. Dr. Chawla is particularly popular for his lecture on the developments in the field of health policy, healthcare reform, practice management and quality service. As a student of Healthcare Administration, Dr. Chawla presents unique insights ranging from practical challenges that clinicians face to opportunities that lie untapped in delivering world class healthcare.