Smart-Care: Healthcare Savings and System Reform

Summary

By using a magnetic stripe card coupled with password and possible biometric protections to securely access online electronic medical records, insurance information and immediate payments we can save up to 15% or more of the cost of healthcare without cutting benefits or payments.  In addition to many beneficial health effects of the proposed system, this can provide a 2.7% boost to the economy since healthcare is about 18% of the cost of most products. If the savings were only 15%, this would be over $500 Billion per year in for the United States.

Concept Overview
 

Problems: The cost of health care and insurance continues to go up, leaving more and more of the population uninsured; the administrative and overall cost of health care in the U.S. is very high (31% on average) while measures of the effectiveness of our healthcare are below those of other advanced countries.  Providers and their staff spend a lot of time and expense figuring out each person’s unique coverage situation in order to correctly bill and collect for services.  We are not using the most modern billing and payment systems despite all our advances, and as individual providers computerize with unique systems, a lack of inter-operability and standardization of systems communication will further increase costs.  Healthcare professions are less attractive to our brightest graduates, eroding the quality of care for our future generations.

Solution: Develop and implement a health card (simple magnetic stripe credit card style) for secure over the web patient identification, registration, payment, and Electronic Medical Records with standards and a program that can be implemented in a step-wise fashion on a voluntary basis by the insurance and health care industries, with government leading the way.

Benefits: Reduced administrative costs and reduced direct costs will allow our healthcare dollars to go further by decreasing the cost of delivery of healthcare to all.  Healthcare satisfaction, delivery and quality are expected to improve.  Extensive and comprehensive data will be available for research to advance healthcare.  Since healthcare is estimated to be 18% of the cost of most products, a 15% savings should have a broad positive impact of a 2.7% boost in the economy.

Direct Government savings on the cost of health benefits for government employees estimated to exceed $35 Billion per year.

Details

Please click here to download the brief, slides, whitepaper & references

I look forward to your comments, concerns and suggestions on implementing this vision. Please feel free to contact me.

Bruce T. Taylor, M.D

Patent pending and copyright 2017 by Bruce T. Taylor, M.D. to protect the concepts for royalty free, public use.  Please note that I do not expect any financial gain from this proposal; there should be no proprietary technology, software or hardware.