What exactly should the hospital of the future look like? Many in academia and beyond have taken a swing at this question. The latest to do so is Timothy Hoff, PhD, professor of management, healthcare systems and health policy at Northeastern University in Boston, and associate fellow at Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford.
Timothy Hoff, PhD
Dr. Hoff’s opinion piece, published last week in Medical Economics, begins by stating that “hospitals will need to rethink their physical footprint, partnerships and care delivery models to remain viable in the decades ahead” to respond to “a perfect storm of change, neglect, financial distress and deteriorating conditions in the healthcare system.”
After examining all of the aspects of that “perfect storm,” Dr. Hoff writes that hospitals will need to “embed themselves within a total health care ecosystem” that deemphasizes the ever-coalescing geographic monopolies that characterize the provision of hospital care in the U.S. today.
“The hospital of the future must be one that fully integrates into a larger care ecosystem, not as the sole controlling force but instead as an orchestrator that draws upon and enables the resources and strengths of other stakeholders such as niche-based community organizations and advocacy groups, technology companies, independent primary and urgent care providers, long term care providers and third-party payers,” writes Dr. Hoff. “This will allow hospitals to grow nimbler in varying the services they provide; leverage others in the community who can do something more efficiently and at a lower cost for the patient; help these other stakeholders grow; integrate services where feasible to achieve greater scale; build goodwill and trust among providers and patients; and innovate in ways that leverage expertise the hospital may not possess.”
He concludes that “without successful reinvention, many more hospitals will close or end up offering an overly narrow, misaligned array of services, resulting in more patients isolated from the care they need and want. It also means the continued drift of hospitals toward being places where neither workers nor patients want to spend their time but instead are forced to for reasons beyond their control. In other words, the hospital of the future will be something that attracts rather than repels.”
Read the full, thought-provoking article here.
