Featuring:
Arielle Trzcinski, Principal Analyst and Judy Weader, Principal Analyst
Show Notes:
Access to essential medical services is drying up in large swaths of the US. The culprits are many: hospital closures, clinician burnout, insurer-provider disputes, regulatory constraints. The consequences could be significant for those living in the impacted areas. This week on What It Means, Principal Analysts Arielle Trzcinski and Judy Weader break down the factors driving medical desert expansion and explain how the trend can be reversed.
The episode starts with the analysts dispelling the notion that medical deserts are confined to rural areas. Weader notes as an example the collapse of the Steward Health Care system, which could result in hospitals closing in urban areas in multiple states. Meanwhile, closures of retail pharmacies in some states are making certain kinds of routine care harder to access. Trzcinski notes that up to one-third of Chicagoans now live in a “pharmacy desert” without easy access to prescriptions.
No matter where they’re located, medical deserts have potentially dire outcomes. “We look at certain areas of the country where, say, reproductive care, maternity care, OB-GYN care is being heavily restricted, and what that means is that you have people who were previously maybe 20 to 50 miles away from a provider now a minimum 200 miles away,” Weader says. “Now we’re getting into bad health outcomes … [that are] bad for the patient, bad for the health system, bad for the insurer.”
The analysts touch on a few positive developments. These include the advance of AI and automation technologies that could help alleviate the administrative burden that contributes to physician burnout and proposed legislation that would help ensure that essential health care is still provided in the event of financial disruption to a healthcare entity. But, Trzcinski says, “we still have a lot of work to do to make sure that those guardrails and protections are there for consumers and the entities across the healthcare ecosystem.”
The discussion then turns to the scourge of cyberattacks targeting the healthcare industry. Healthcare is a prime target for ransomware attacks because of the nature of the data held in medical-related systems. Yet more than half of healthcare organizations spend 10% or less on IT, Forrester data shows. Trzcinski notes that while this is starting to change, with security becoming a bigger focus, healthcare entities need to move quickly to better protect patients’ data.
The episode concludes with Trzcinski and Weader proposing changes that the various healthcare system players — providers, retail pharmacies, insurers — could make to improve matters for patients. “Everybody needs to be part of this solution because everybody was part of making the problem,” Weader says.
