“The healthcare industry has been forced to accept change. Nearly every speech, article and white paper by healthcare executives begins by acknowledging this. However, there is no precedent for the depth, range and complexity of change facing payers and providers at this time.”

So begins the first of a series of white papers on “Mastering Change: Succeeding in Healthcare’s New World Order,” by noted healthcare transformation expert Dr. Emad Rizk.

Get a copy of this new white paper to learn why rapid transformation has become an imperative, where it needs to start, and what innovations are creating a promising path forward. Dr. Rizk describes the conditions and strategies necessary for payers and providers to manage the pressures they face today while positioning themselves to thrive in an industry that will be transformed by advanced payment and care delivery models.

Matthew Zubiller, Laura Coughlin, RN, and A. Jacqueline Mitus, MD described the application of “content as a service” (CaaS) to healthcare on February 12 in Executive Insights: 

With CaaS, rules are housed in one secured, centralized repository – in “the cloud” – and delivered via technologies based on Web services, so that they can be deployed seamlessly to deliver up-to-date, actionable content into any healthcare workflow for simultaneous use by any stakeholder.

What benefits accrue when healthcare content is centrally maintained, shared as a common language by all stakeholders, and delivered as needed to any point of care? A cohesive ecosystem forms that makes the most intelligent clinical and financial decisions about care, resulting in better quality and more cost-efficient care outcomes.

Read the article here.

As the industry makes the transition to care delivery and payment models that recognize and reward value over volume, cloud computing is well positioned to be a key enabler of change. Before they can work together more effectively towards high-quality care at an affordable cost, payers, providers, and health care consumers must agree on what they are working toward: What care is appropriate? What care will be paid for? What are the variables that affect selection among a variety of health care options? Through the cloud, this information can be accessed, reconciled, analyzed, and delivered. Read the full article by Bob Franceschini, vice president for enterprise architecture in Managed Care Magazine.

Here, Bob Franceschini, vice president of enterprise architecture and technology for McKesson Health Solutions, discusses the applicability and benefits of cloud computing in healthcare with interviewer Mabel Jong.

In part two of his guest blog post for Healthcare Payer News, Emad Rizk, MD, president of McKesson Health Solutions, details the technology required to support the strategy for creating a health plan from scratch that he outlined in part 1. With these four key technology enablers, health plans will have the automation needed to excel in this new era of healthcare.

 http://www.healthcarepayernews.com/content/what-if-you-created-health-plan-scratch-part-2-0