Obamacare Upheld: How The SCOTUS Decision Benefits Health IT
By Ken Congdon, editor in chief, Health IT Outcomes
Follow Me On Twitter @KenOnHIT
It was one of the most highly anticipated Supreme Court rulings in years. For those of us that followed CNN’s coverage of the announcement, it also proved to be one of the most confusing. However, once the dust settled, we learned that the Court largely upheld the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), also known as the healthcare reform law or Obamacare, by a 5-4 vote. Even the controversial provision for universal coverage was upheld by not mandating that citizens buy health insurance, but by taxing them if they don’t.
The Supreme Court decision was a victory for President Obama, liberals, and millions of currently uninsured Americans. At the same time, the ruling will undoubtedly solidify Republican efforts to ensure the law gets repealed. Make no mistake about it, the Supreme Court will not have the final word on Obamacare, the voters will come November.
Obamacare Is Good For Health IT
I will keep my emotional reaction to the Obamacare ruling to myself, but I’ve always believed that the law is good for health IT. Many experts argue that the health IT industry would have been unaffected had Obamacare been struck down. They cite the preservation of the health IT incentives included in the HITECH (The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act to support their stance. They also argue that many hospitals are too far down the path to EHR adoption for the Obamacare ruling to have a major impact on their future technology implementation plans.
While I agree that the health IT industry would have been “just fine” had Obamacare been stuck down, I also believe the outlook for the industry is even brighter with the law being upheld. While the PPACA doesn’t directly address technology, it does include some provisions that are more-or-less technology dependent. For example, PPACA includes some Medicare programs that give preferential treatment to providers that have installed EHRs, providing added motivation for providers to install the software. Furthermore, the bundled payments initiative — a PPACA provision where Medicare pays for services delivered across an episode of care — will incentivize hospitals and physicians to coordinate care and eliminate duplication of services. This effort would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without the implementation of technology that allows electronic health data to be exchanged. Without Obamacare, the motivation to make system-to-system connections with other providers would not be as strong, and providers would not feel as much urgency to engage in these initiatives sooner rather than later.
In an effort to survive or thrive under the bundled payment reimbursement model, providers and vendors alike will also have to get serious about patient engagement and business analytics. Providers will need to have insight into key patient population metrics and encourage self-management of chronic diseases and wellness plans, all of which will be facilitated by these technologies.
Let The Healthcare Transformation Continue
Perhaps the best thing to come out of the Supreme Court decision on PPACA for the health IT industry is a renewed sense of focus. It’s not as though health IT initiatives went on hold for the past few months, but it did seem like there was a collective “holding of breath” to see how the future landscape of healthcare would be shaped by the Supreme Court ruling, particularly among health IT vendors. Now that questions about the constitutionality of PPACA have been vetted by the highest court in the nation, we can redirect our focus towards transforming healthcare for the better through the proper application of existing technologies and the innovation of new ones.