The wide adoption of healthcare bundles is rapidly transforming the modern medical landscape end-to-end; patients, providers, and healthcare systems are moving towards these comprehensive solutions that consolidate disparate areas of care, making treatment plans more predictable, reliable, and easier to navigate.
When it comes time to consider whether bundled healthcare solutions are right for you or your business, we’re here to break down exactly how they function to eliminate redundancies, lower costs, and improve overall patient experience and outcomes.
Understanding Bundled Healthcare Solutions
In recent years, the move towards more holistic models of care has characterized the modern evolution of healthcare. Within large and obfuscating care systems, bundled healthcare solutions are one of the prominent strategies that align the incentives between providers and patients—improving efficiency, transparency, and, most crucially, the quality of care itself.
Bundled solutions integrate and encompass a set of healthcare services and procedures for treating a specific illness or condition, forming a standardized package presented to patients at the onset of their course of treatment. These bundles link payments between facilities and providers, offering a new level of omniscience and clarity regarding chronic and acute issues.
Why Health In Tech Privileges Healthcare Bundles
Here at Health In Tech, we believe that precedent should be interrogated, reformed, and productively disrupted to accommodate the ever-changing needs of both patients and providers.
The comprehensive care inherent in our cradle-to-grave approach fosters a deep emphasis on transparency and streamlined practices, making healthcare more feasible than ever for the businesses and communities we serve. That’s why bundled healthcare solutions’ importance and benefits cannot be understated.
Value-Based Over Volume-Based Care
The model of volume-based care also referred to as a “fee-for-service” model, compensates providers and organizations for the amount of services they provide rather than focusing on bettering overall patient outcomes. A volume-based model depletes institutional resources by prioritizing the quantity of services rendered over the quality of a patient’s care, meaning it can often lead to overbilling, overdiagnosis, and administrative burdens.
On the other hand, value-based models include bundled healthcare solutions to deliver the best of patient-centric and evidence-based care, like those in Health In Tech’s HI Performance Network (HPN), which offers a curated network of service providers that deliver high-quality care. HPNs privilege outcomes over output and long-term over short-term care, often holding in-network providers to stricter standards than most preferred provider organizations (or PPOs).
Total Cost Transparency
A significant advantage to adopting healthcare bundles is their emphasis on total cost transparency; healthcare bundles offer a single, all-inclusive price for a specific instance of care, unlike traditional fee-for-service models. Because the pricing of these packages is entirely predetermined, they offer the added benefit of allowing patients to budget effectively for their care ahead of time, eliminating the anxious uncertainty that often goes hand in hand with unpredictable and astronomical medical bills.
One of Health In Tech’s fundamental values is using technology solutions to provide clients and users with 100% transparency regarding their treatment plans and benefits. That’s why bundled solutions perfectly align with our HI Performance Network, which offers clients clear price consistency, better savings, and lower deductibles. HPNs offer lower out-of-pocket costs and prevent patients from being overbilled—sometimes for up to 900% more than Medicare’s equivalent service(s).
A 2016 study conducted by JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) that studied the financial efficacy of healthcare bundles regarding lower extremity joint replacement episodes found that Medicare payments declined in participating hospitals without compromising the quality of care provided.
Holistic Care Coordination
Traditionally, patients must contend with an obfuscated labyrinth of insurance claims, medical bills, and separate payment platforms, leading to endless confusion and frustration. Hospitals and physicians must also contend with information silos and gaps in communication between dispersed personnel and treatment facilities. Bundled healthcare solutions encourage a more seamless stream of information and care coordination in a patient’s wellness journey, channeling communication between providers and specialists regarding the treatment plan a priori.
Patient Empowerment
Unfortunately, the healthcare system today corners patients into being passive participants in their treatment plans, succumbing to the uncertainty and unpredictability of their care, which has historically ingrained a disempowering acceptance of a healthcare system rife with anxiety and financial blind spots.
Luckily, these unfortunate aspects are not necessarily inherent but systemic side-effects of a piecemeal and fragmentary system. With bundled care, the patient experience is instead centered around informed choices, shared decision-making, and predictable cost transparency, allowing patients to plan and budget for their care ahead of time effectively.
Financial Incentives for Providers and Employers
With healthcare bundles, all stakeholders stand to benefit; they mean fewer rejected claims and allow both payers and employers to offer more affordable benefits and products. The cost predictability of bundles similarly assists providers with better financial planning and underwriting, which can be done using Health In Tech’s proprietary SaaS eDIYBS underwriting platform. This technology is perfect for generating self-funded plans for startups and small businesses looking to build out competitive health insurance programs.
Error Mitigation
The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that globally, one in ten patients are harmed during hospitalization, with much of this being preventable. Bundled healthcare solutions may relieve some of this burden by fostering greater collaboration and standardization among providers and protocols. They also decrease treatment-related hospitalizations, complications, and readmissions.
Health In Tech: Delivering the Benefits of Healthcare Bundles
Health In Tech is an industry leader in revolutionizing participant experience and outcomes within the healthcare sector. With over 30 years of experience, we’ve built a highly-qualified network of contacts in all 50 states—including 4,727 hospitals and 1,595,049 provider locations—that empower our clients with cradle-to-grave health solutions and benefits.
Our technology runs on an ethos of transparency and efficiency, helping brokers, employers, insurers, and patients administer and use their health benefits to the fullest. Contact us today to learn how we can help you integrate more efficient healthcare bundles and services into your praxis.