PCPs Responsible for Allocating About 90% of Total Hospital Costs

In a recent blog (see:Defining and Delineating the Changing First Tier of Healthcare), I wrote the following regarding the evolving role of physicians in the first tier of healthcare (i.e. primary care):Physicians work primarily in a supervisory role. The majority of them are, and will be in the foreseeable future, employees of health systems....Direct contact with patients and triaging will be mainly the responsibility of nurses, nurse clinicians, physician assistants, and other health assistants.All of these later personnel will be increasingly guided by diagnostic and predictive algorithms that will allow them to identify the more seriously sick patients and refer them to physician specialists operating at the higher levels of care.On July 23, 2019,Deloitte Consulting presented a webinar entitled:The future of work in life sciences and healthcare: Are you ready? The presentation was outstanding and novel and I urge you to review the entire PowerPoint deck. However, and for the purposes of this note, I cite the following copied from Slide #11 in the deck: Decisions made by Primary Care Physicians influence almost 90% of total hospital costs through referrals, testing, and hospitalizations.This statement caused me to realize that my quote above the role of physicians in the first tier of healthcare was accurate but somewhat incomplete. One of the most important"supervisory" functions of primary care physicians is to approve specialist referrals, e...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Clinical Lab Testing Cost of Healthcare Diagnostics Healthcare Delivery Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Hospital Financial Predictive Analytics Public Health Source Type: blogs