Changing radiology in the changing hospital environment.
J Am Coll Radiol. 2013 Dec;10(12):887-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jacr.2013.03.010. Epub 2013 Jul 13.
Afable R, Brant-Zawadzki MN.
Today, the unsustainable growth of health care expenditures is forcing dramatic change. The focus of health care policy is on identifying and eliminating unnecessary waste, maximizing patient safety and satisfaction, and, most important, improving clinical outcomes. Payers have begun to drive the transformation from an unsustainably expensive, dysfunctionally fragmented health care system, one that has been institution and provider centered, to an efficient, cost-effective, seamless continuum of care, one focused on the ultimate customers, namely, the patients themselves. Imaging is deeply embedded in hospitals. Hospitals have been the anchors of health care delivery. Hospitals are evolving from providing high-cost episodic acute care to being participants in a system maintaining population health. Many patient encounters that traditionally occurred within hospitals, including surgeries, are now more efficiently performed outside their walls, with greater safety and at markedly lower costs. The hospital remains a necessary component of health care delivery, but linkage to outpatient facilities as well as the home is increasingly important for hospital-anchored health care delivery systems. Indeed, even wellness has come within the sphere of responsibility of an integrated population health system.