To understand what’s wrong with the current approach to healthcare in the United States, consider the experience of a typical patient with chronic knee pain. He goes to his general practitioner (for a referral), who then sends him to an orthopedist (for an initial diagnosis), who then sends him to an imaging facility (for an MRI). If the patient needs a knee replacement, he’ll have the operation done at a hospital (with a new set of specialists, including an anesthesiologist and nursing staff), and once he’s discharged, he’ll visit a physical therapist (for rehab). Five separate facilities, five sets of “new patient” forms. Months later, the patient will be back at the office of his general practitioner—who will have had almost no involvement since signing the original referral—and the doctor will ask, with genuine curiosity, “How’d it go?”
This is not a well-oiled machine for delivering quality care. It is, however, a very effective way to rack up charges, with little relationship to patient outcomes or experience. In fact, healthcare is a kind of à la carte hell for most patients (along with their…show more content… Moreover, we recently completed comprehensive surveys of stakeholders in the U.S. health system, including patients, employers, physicians and hospitals, and insurers. The results show that bundles are generating increasing momentum. The ACA is also fueling demand: It explicitly encourages bundling experiments and innovations, and more than 450 provider organizations have signed up as part of the demonstration and piloting phase. Although the precise impact of the ACA is still playing out, there is mounting evidence that bundles will be a critical part of any solution for the U.S. healthcare system—a means to deliver a higher-quality patient experience, achieve better results, and reduce