A paper presented at the Texas Health Law Conference this week outlines how mergers and acquisitions and disruptive innovation are creating healthcare world increasingly focused on patients.
The Polsinelli law firm’s paper analyzes several mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare industry and makes conclusions about the future of the healthcare industry, and was written by Dallas office lawyers Jon Henderson, Andrew Kinworthy, and Kevin McDonnell. Several themes arose in the study, including private equity ownership, integrated care continuum, consumerism, shifting from in-patient to out-patient care and toward value-based care centered around data analytics. The paper concludes that these changes will improve patient care and higher reimbursement for healthcare providers.
The study looked at mergers and acquisitions between Amazon and Pillpack, Cigna and Express Scripts, Aetna and CVS Health, and more, focusing on ownership, organization, delivery and payment.
While the healthcare industry has been slow to be disrupted by technology, new delivery methods such as telehealth, artificial intelligence, and 3-D printing are all having increasing impacts.
Movement from a fee for service model to value-based care, where patients pay for outcomes rather than services rendered and giving consumers more choice in how, from whom and where they receive their healthcare also appears to be the way of the future.
Offering services all along a patient’s care continuum and moving from less inpatient to more outpatient services are also trends highlighted by the study.
Polsinelli employs 825 attorneys in 21 offices nationwide, where they focus on healthcare, finance, real estate and more. They were 2018′ “Law Firm of the Year” for Health Care in U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Law Firms.”
Read the whole paper here.
