“There are still so many unknown variables.”
Like other public health officials, Ed Ricks is sifting through a number of emotions upon analyzing the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act announced last Thursday: uncertainty, positivity, hope, surprise.
The CIO of Beaufort Memorial Hospital in South Carolina is looking to the ACA ruling to bring major changes to the health care model – especially regarding reimbursement trends. In his words: “The model we have now is not sustainable.”
Government Health IT Contributor Kate Spies spoke with Ricks about his reaction to the SCOTUS ruling, the impact he anticipates it will have particular to Beaufort, and thoughts on how it will affect technology adoption in public health.
Q: What is your reaction to the Supreme Court ruling on the ACA?
A: I guess I’m a little surprised, from one perspective. From another, I don’t think it really matters, because – to some degree or another – health care reform is going to come. By health care reform, I mean reimbursement changes; the model we have now is not sustainable. So we’ve been trying to get our arms around how to prepare changes, regardless of whether it’s this particular act or not.
Q: How do you think it will affect your organization in particular?
A: There are still so many unknown variables, but I guess one thing that’s nice is that we do see a large population of indigent or uninsured patients. So to one degree of another every patient will have insurance, and that’s got to be a positive. But as a community hospital, we never turn anybody away; the ability to pay isn’t anything we consider. We do have a large amount of charity care and bad debt, so that structure’s probably going to change to some degree.
[Related: SCOTUS ruling a 'great success' for public, population health.]
But I think we also recognize that a big component of this particular act is going to cut a large amount of reimbursement from the overall system over the next ten years, so we’re still trying to figure out exactly what that will mean to us.
Q: How do you see this ruling affecting technology adoption in the sector of public health?
A: I think that it might be a wake-up call for some people. I believe we were already down the right path. But knowing that somehow reimbursement is going to change fundamentally (and probably based on outcomes or population health management, which we could all see happening in the long run) I think that the IT’s really got more of a critical role than before. We know we’ve got to connect to every piece of data that’s relevant for a patient population, whether it’s ours or not. I think that’s the key thing, is how we get all the community physician practices engaged in this, and get one aggregate health record so that we can better manage our population’s health.
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