Cost
Healthcare spending in the United States is on an unsustainable trajectory. A few unnerving facts:
- Federal healthcare expenditures as a percentage of GDP is expected to rise to 8.1% in 2018 (GDP average growth only 4.4%)1
- Over 16% of GDP is spent on healthcare (Germany, Canada, U.K., Australia – all under 10%)2
- Spending isn’t buying quality: deaths per 100,000 is higher in the U.S. than all of the above-mentioned countries3
- Medicare outlays expected to double by 2020 to nearly $1 trillion4
- All of this is happening against the backdrop of an unprecedented federal deficit
Healthcare reform will bring structural change to reimbursement, applying dual pressure on both fees and performance requirements. Removing cost has become imperative for all healthcare organizations.
Radiology practices and hospitals who work with vRad realize numerous opportunities for managing cost.
- Strapped for cash and faced with replacing an end-of-life PACS, St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nevada, avoided a $1+ million capital expenditure by implementing vRad’s cloud solution for PACS replacement.
- Eagle Imaging Partners increased practice efficiency 36% after adopting the vRad Enterprise Connect radiology workflow platform. This allowed them to take on many new accounts without adding staff.
- After replacing preliminary interpretations with vRad Finals, Rush Health Systems eliminated up to 50 morning over-reads each day, freeing up time to take on 20,000 new annual interpretations without increasing the number of radiologists.
- By partnering with vRad, four Sacramento-area hospitals in the Catholic Healthcare West system were able to avoid bottlenecks caused by volume spikes and increase emergency room patient throughput approximately 55% without adding technologists and clerical staff.
1 Source: CBO “Projections of National Health Expenditures,” 2009.
2 U.S. Treasury
3 Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis, Health Affairs 27(I) (Jan-Feb, 2008): 58-71.
4 2010 projection based on Kaiser Family Foundation and data from Congressional Budget Office, August 2010.