Embracing The Network

June 3, 2016 by InTouch Health

There have been dozens of books published on how to “fix” healthcare, but probably one of the best is “Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur’s Guide To Fixing Healthcare” by Jonathan Bush (who also happens to be CEO and co-founder of healthcare software giant athenahealth).

In a recent article, Bush proclaimed that the “future of the hospital is the network.” He praised Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York for its marketing campaign headlined “If Our Beds Are Filled, It Means We’ve Failed.” Those ads show that Mt. Sinai is serious about moving away from isolated, intermittent care to continuous, coordinated care – a shift that Bush feels all hospitals should make.

Bush believes that successful hospitals are rapidly moving from the EHR-centric model, to the patient-centric world of cross-continuum connectedness, a/k/a the network. Telehealth is an integral part of that brave new world.

Telehealth is the arterial system that can connect acute care specialists, home health providers, Ambulatory Surgery Centers, imaging centers, and all points between. Bush foresees a day (coming soon) when a patient can get an immunization at a retail clinic, an outpatient surgery at an ASC, and a telehealth consultation at home all in a single week.

That’s the “right care, right time” mantra that has long been the guiding principle of telehealth.

Bush sees a bright future for telehealth because relying on a robust network is the only way to “unbreak” our healthcare system.