Containing Healthcare Costs in the New COVID Reality

Today's healthcare industry is not the one we knew at the beginning of 2020. New and complex challenges have arisen with the advent of the COVID pandemic, starting with the suspension of nonessential procedures, which constitute healthcare organizations' primary revenue source.

In a new report released by the AHA, it was found that the healthcare sector will suffer losses of at least $323.1 billion in 2020 as a result of COVID. Further, the increasing costs of COVID treatment have exceeded emergency government funding and have compounded healthcare facilities’ budgets alongside a decline of 19.5% in inpatient and 24.5% in outpatient volumes. 

In addition to these immediately pressing financial concerns, hospitals are also navigating increasingly enormous volumes of electronic personal health information (ePHI) being shared over progressively complex and insecure IT networks. Protecting ePHI is crucial to patient privacy, and paramount to incurring regulatory fines, reputational damage, and business loss. Each of these issues compounded with the rising costs of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the explosive rise in connected devices (20 billion devices today and 50 billion expected by 2028) is placing healthcare institutions in unprecedented financial straits.

Healthcare facilities are bleeding money and must reduce expenses. The question is how?

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