Top 4 Barriers and Solutions to Clinical Excellence in Today's Healthcare System

As we step into another pandemic year, it’s important to remember all the needs the healthcare system had for change before COVID. Before the pandemic, we had a healthcare system that was brilliant but costly and inconsistent across populations and care needs. COVID demonstrated all those things were truer than we realized. If we want to focus on patients and the health of our communities in a broad way, we will need a lot more than brilliant (though burned out) clinical practitioners and creative pharmaceutical minds. We need to look at the significant obstacles to reform that existed before COVID.

Today’s value-based care debate assumes that with financial flexibility, providers will be able to solve a bunch of problems (care at people’s homes and preventive medicine) without causing others. That is a mistake. When we free up resources out of the hospitals to do all these other things, that assumes nothing is lost in terms of the hospital.