It’s Time for the Evolution — and Revolution — of Private Practice

Tech-enabled health care is the collective term used for telecare, telehealth, telemedicine, digital health, and e-health services. Technology, if done well, helps some patients manage their care and medications and alerts health care professionals in case of a material change in condition. But most of us don’t have many patients who fit this profile; real digital health uptake is probably a decade away.

The rapid uptake of telemedicine and remote monitoring has begun to upend the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) business models. Also shifting are the contracting strategies that have allowed the duopoly of hospital systems and insurers to increasingly dominate the delivery of care for the past 50 years.

With prepaid care, the imperatives for the contracted doctors are to prevent and preempt bad outcomes, coordinate care, and eliminate low-value procedures and many unnecessary referrals and hospitalizations.