Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, and welcome back. Today, we are going to continue on with our unit two on the history of healthcare. But we're actually going to be talking about current trends related to healthcare and kind of how we've changed over time. So first, let's talk about what even is a trend. A trend is a general direction in which something is developing or changing. You can probably think of trends like music trends and trends in fashion and how things kind of come in and out of season. Some common types of trends that we really see in our world are fashion trends, political trends, financial trends, environmental trends, and healthcare trends. Some of the most common trends related to healthcare are things like cost containment, home health, telemedicine, wellness and prevention, alternative medicine, and geriatric care. But let's talk about each of these on their own. Cost containment is the business practice of maintaining expensive levels to prevent unnecessary spending or thoughtfully reducing expenses in order to improve profitability without long-term damage to the company. Reasons for high cost of healthcare include things like technological advancements, the aging population, and health-related lawsuits. Basically, cost containment means what can we do as a company to help lower our cost and bring in more money and become more profitable. If you look at how the U.S. healthcare spending is currently allocated, you'll see that the largest majority of it, 32%, goes towards hospitals, which makes sense. They make up the largest portion of our healthcare expenses. And then we can see that the next portion of 20% goes to physician and clinical services, followed by 15% for other healthcare spending, which could really include a lot of different things. And some of our more smaller amounts, like the 3% goes towards home health and the 5% towards nursing care. However, we're going to see that later home health is becoming a big trend in healthcare, and we may see this pie chart kind of start to change over time. Methods of cost containment include things like diagnostic-related groups. This means that everyone with the same diagnosis would be in one payment group. It's a limit, and the limit is then placed on the cost of their care, and agencies have to stay within this budget, meaning everyone within kind of the same diagnostic group cannot spend more than a certain amount of money on healthcare, or they have to keep those costs down for that group. If the agency does go over the limit, then they have to pay those costs out of pocket. Outpatient services are less expensive than inpatient care because you don't have to pay for a room, for food, extra supplies, or extra healthcare workers. So we really encourage patients to have outpatient services performed if possible. Energy conservation, like recycling and turning off the lights and monitoring TV use in the hospitals and doctor's offices is another way to conserve energy, but also in the end save on your bill. And then early intervention and prevention strategies is one of the biggest methods of cost containment. By having people come and take their yearly physical exams, we are better at detecting diagnoses earlier, and then treating them faster, which will then lower the cost of their healthcare. Also getting immunizations like vaccines will help prevent someone from getting sick and therefore decrease their healthcare costs. Patient education is also important in making sure that patients understand their diagnosis or ways to prevent it, and therefore they become healthier and their cost is lowered. Or purchasing in mass quantities or bulk purchasing helps to save money for a company over time. Next is home health. So home health may include things like occupational and physical therapy, speech therapy, social services, nutritional services, and skilled nursing care, meaning hands-on nursing medical care. It may involve helping older adults with activities of their daily living like eating, brushing their teeth, washing their laundry, cooking, bathing, dressing, and all of those types of things. Result of diagnosis-related groups and shorter hospital stays. So basically, we want to encourage people to not stay in the hospital for as long because if they're able to go home, then the cost of their care is less. So if we send them home, they may still need a little bit of help, and that's where home health comes in. They're able to go home. They're able to be in the comfort of their own home. They have a faster release time for the hospital, which means a cheaper bill. It allows the family and the patient to be more involved in their own care, and it overall just improves the quality of life and morale of the patient. Telemedicine has become a huge trend in healthcare, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic because people have not wanted to go into the doctor's offices. Doctors and hospitals were actually canceling most of their outpatient services, were really encouraging patients to stay home if at all possible and to only come into the hospital if it was absolutely a medical emergency. So they've really turned to telehealth or telemedicine as a way to reach their patients remotely. This refers to the practice of caring for patients remotely when the provider and the patient are not physically present with each other, kind of like we're doing right now during school. You could look at telemedicine as teleeducation. Modern technology has enabled doctors to consult patients by using HIPAA Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliant video conferencing tools, and you'll learn more about HIPAA later on. This uses things like video, audio, and computers to provide care to those in a different location. So just like you would hop on this Google Meet to talk to your teacher, they could hop onto Zoom or any other type of video chatting service and be able to receive medical care. It also helps emergency medical services perform pre-hospital medical care on their way in transportation of a patient. They're able to reach out to the local hospital on their way while they're transporting someone and say, hey, here's what's going on, what can we do in the meantime while we get there? And this can be used over short or very long distances. You can perform telemedicine meetings from the other side of the world if necessary. Wellness and prevention is the process of trying to prevent illness and disease and really take care of the overall body, mind, spirit, and everything all in one in order to try to prevent illness. We can prevent illness in a multitude of different ways. Vaccines is the first one, which prevents illness and disease by boosting your immune system and exposing you to the disease prior to actually catching it. Exercise improves mood, your overall physical and mental wellness. It improves stamina. It improves your immune system function, and it releases endorphins, which make you feel happier. And then stress management techniques can be used, such as therapy, massage, relaxation, breathing techniques, and yoga. As far as other wellness techniques, we've looked at nutrition and diet, and we know that a good nutrition and a good diet directly relates to your physical health, and weight loss interventions can be very important for some individuals as well. When we're looking at your personal life, we are looking at your individual group or family therapy, do you need some type of behavioral health support, child protective services, or social workers? And then lastly, annual exams and wellness checks are a great way to detect illness and disease early to get a diagnosis and to get treatment started much sooner and faster. Here are the eight dimensions of wellness, which you'll learn more about in other classes down the road, but just as a general overview, this is kind of how we look at the wellness overall of a person. Next is holistic medicine, and holistic medicine really promotes the physical, emotional, social, intellectual, and spiritual well-being of a whole, treating the whole body, the mind, and the spirit without the use of medicine or medicinal interventions. For example, if you have a cold, we might treat it with chicken soup and rest and just letting the cold run its course rather than giving you medicine to take. Sometimes we also use herbs and natural remedies instead of drugs, for example, using honey to treat a sore throat, and other things like acupuncture, massage, art therapy, and music therapy are all examples of commonly practiced holistic medicine approaches. Holistic medicine ties directly to wellness because holistic medicine is kind of the future of the wellness industry, and actually, I am taking my grad school classes right now through App State, and for one of my final projects for my courses over the summer, I had to write this huge research paper about why holistic health is the future of the wellness industry and create a website and everything that goes along with it, so I'm actually going to attach that paper that I wrote to your Canvas page just in case you are ever interested or if you want to learn more about holistic medicine, it'll be there for you to look at. Next, we have geriatric medicine, and geriatric medicine is something that is very close to my heart because when I was in college, I worked as a certified nursing assistant for four years, and I worked in a geriatric medicine or assisted living facility, and specifically, I worked with the Alzheimer's and dementia patients, so geriatric medicine is very important, and as you'll discover, it's becoming a booming industry for a variety of different reasons, so geriatric basically just means caring for the elderly or people over the age of 65. People are tending to live longer and healthier lives, and so with that, we need to have access to long-term care facilities, assisted living facilities, and communities for these older individuals to live in. OBRA is the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, and this was passed for nursing and geriatric assistants. All must have a mandatory training and pass a written test before they are allowed to work in a nursing home, and all must continue the education units to show that they can demonstrate their knowledge. So one of the big reasons that we are seeing an increased number of adults over the age of 65 is because of baby boomers. Baby boomers are those people who were born between the time of 1946 and 1964, and this timeframe is most commonly used to define them as it was right after the war ended and people were coming home and having kids. The first baby boomers reached the standard retirement age of 65 in 2011, and they are continuing to age right now. So right now, there are about 76 million boomers in the United States, representing 29% of the population, which is almost a third of the population, which is huge, and so we have to provide care for these elderly patients, and they make up a giant portion of the amount of money spent in healthcare every year. Baby boomers is something else I also talked about in that paper that I wrote, which is on your Canvas page, if you're interested in reading. So what are some of the top current trends right now? These change every single year, but some of the current ones that we've seen over the past 2018, 2019, and 2020 are consolidation, which is the action or process of combining a number of things into one single, more effective, coherent whole. Basically, we're starting to see more medical facilities start to combine together or consolidate to make giant healthcare networks. You may notice things like Novant or Wake Forest Baptist, how they have many doctor's offices and facilities throughout North Carolina, so those are examples of consolidation. Consumerism, which we briefly already talked about, which is just the protection or promotion of the interest of consumers. Telehealth, again, we've already talked about this one, but that's the practice of caring for patients remotely when the provider and the patient are not physically together. Huge trend right now. AI, which is artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is using robots or mechanics and machinery to be able to promote health and wellness outcomes. An example of AI that I have sitting right here is my cell phone. I have an app on my phone called KHealth. I'm able to directly chat with a doctor anytime I need to, and they are actually the ones that prescribe me medications and things like that. You can use artificial intelligence to communicate with a doctor, and not only am I able to chat with a real-life doctor, which would be more of an example of telehealth, but the artificial intelligence is that they will go through a series of questions with a robot where you put in your symptoms and what you're feeling, and they'll ask you some yes or no questions, and they're able to go through statistically what is most likely wrong with you and narrow that down much more faster than if you had to sit and wait to talk to an actual doctor. Staffing shortages is a huge problem in the healthcare field and in many other career fields. There's a decrease in healthcare staff due to the increase in the amount of education that's required to work in healthcare, but that also means that there's job security in healthcare because we need healthcare workers, and so your job security is very high, but because of the amount of education, we're starting to see a decreased number in people who are interested in going to school to become physicians and veterinarians and dentists and things like that. Cybersecurity, as much technology as we use every single day in healthcare, cybersecurity has become a huge topic because with the increase in technology in healthcare and the use of electronic medical records, the need for cybersecurity has also greatly increased. And then lastly, wearable technology. Today is actually the first day. I don't have my watch on. I think I've left it in my car, but I have a Fitbit Versa. There's also Apple watches, Garmin watches, and tons of other brands out there that allow the average individual to closely monitor their health and track their physical activity, diet, sleep, and vital signs directly from their phones, from their watches, from they even have wearable shirts and wearable technology, hats and sunglasses and all of this wearable tech that allows us to get a better look at our health. That is also included in that paper that is on Canvas. I highly, highly, highly recommend that you read this paper, not because I wrote it. I actually don't really care about the fact that I wrote it. I am proud of it. But because there's just so much information that is so relevant to the current trends in healthcare in that paper. So, yes, that is there for you. There's also a link right here that will take you to a blog about the top eight healthcare trends of 2019. That is it for today. As always, if you need anything, reach out to me on Remind or email, and I will see you all later. Bye, guys.