The New York Times reported today on a report from JAMA that there is at least $760 Billion in annual waste in the US Healthcare system. Of that , $266 Billion is lost to administrative complexity, $230 Billion is lost to pricing failures, fraud and abuse accounts for at least $58 Billion. Failure of care delivery, failure of care coordination, and over treatment of low-value care account for the remaining sources of waste.
Why?
When it comes to administrative costs, the report says that while this is the largest source of waste, there are no studies on the potential to reduce this! Holy Crap!
JAMA states: “Presumably, all health systems, clinician practices, and payers have efforts underway to simplify processes and explore digital solutions to reduce administrative complexity.” Let’s hope so!
At TiqiPay we continue working on solutions to waste in the health care system. We focus on office and ambulatory settings, where administrative processes designed for complex and pricey intensive services, like hospitalizations, combined with the ever-increasing shift of first dollar responsibility to patients with high deductibles, creates effort, headache, and frustration for everyone involved, with little real benefit.
There’s no reason retail purchasing and paying for retail healthcare can’t be as simple as going out to eat!