March Madness, Healthcare Style…
If healthcare had its own March Madness it might as well look something like this:
Looking at this it’s quite clear there are a few sleepers. Nurses, for one, are probably underseeded at 5 and despite a shortage have been rising in value could come out of the Midwest. Social workers may give ER doctors some trouble unless the game is close when the ER team thrives. Neurologists and Psychiatrists face off in an inter-specialty tussle, while autism techs may give ophthalmologists some trouble given fan support. To make your Final 4 healthcare picks in our moderately hypothetical bracket, click here.
To check out the actual healthcare payer priority top 20 rankings, click here, and to listen to our 40 minute zoom discussion click here (and then simply enter your email and use this password X1@73cKU to access it).
Healthcare’s rankings of the top 20 payer priorities are in many ways a competition not unlike the March Madness basketball tourney. If this were a basketball tournament would #9 CKD/nephrology upset #8 orthopedics, like on a last second kidney disease shot? I mean, the two services do sometimes share the same patients – long-term NSAID use for treating knee pain can lead to chronic kidney disease after all – and they do indirectly compete for more of the health insurer’s value based dollars.….March madness is definitely a time when we pick upsets like #12 Harvard over #5 Cincinnati because if any student-athlete can figure out the right angle at which to shoot a basketball, it’s gotta be a Harvard kid. But what we lose in common sense we gain in rationalization. We know we should pick #3 Creighton over #14 University of Louisiana at Lafayette, but we change our minds because Creighton’s “Billy the BlueJay” can’t possibly defend Lafayette’s “Ragin’ Cajuns.” I mean, anyone named Billy or any blue bird has no shot against anything that rages. That’s just not a fair fight. Some of us only pick teams if they are a state, like Florida or Arizona, rather than Wofford or Mercer, which sound more like states of depression. “Hi Honey, you seem down today.” “Yeah, I’m feeling very Wofford.” As much as we all have differences in our picks, and tendencies for who we like and why, we’re all connected this year by a common cause. Mental health - improving it, destigmatizing it, trying to see it when it’s not so obvious, and trying to admit we struggle with it. Services designed to address it are ranked 5th in this year’s index of healthcare payer priorities, a ranking not all that different than March Madness rankings given healthcare providers are all competing in one way or another - for talent, for a good seeding in networks, and for our time and copays. Speaking of which – I’m enroute to my internist this morning and with any luck will pass the test and make it back for our conference call to discuss the rankings and, if the spirit moves, maybe sing the Wofford College fight song…..something like “Hail Wofford, Old Gold and Black…we’re proud to claim your name, with honor and pride we attack, now go and win this game!”
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Click here for the index of payer priorities for 2023 and to listen the discussion about the findings, click here, and then simply enter your email and use this password X1@73cKU to access the discussion.