What Revolutionary Healthcare Leaders Are Reading: The Top 5 4sight Health Commentaries Over the Past Six Months

4sight Health’s writers and authors have published 57 blog posts, commentaries, podcasts and videos on 4sighthealth.com from January through June of this year. The topics are as varied as the nearly $4 trillion healthcare industry itself. But, one philosophy ties together each piece of healthcare thought-leadership content on our site: outcomes matter, customers count and value rules.

Below are the five most-read pieces on our site this year so far, as measured by the website pages with the most page views. The topics are varied—from urgent care to interoperability to physician relations to affordability. But, they do have something in common. Each demonstrates the need to fix something that’s gone horribly wrong in healthcare, whether that something is convenience, access to data, best medical practices or the cost of care.  

The pieces’ popularity also demonstrates a desire by revolutionary healthcare executives—our target and preferred audience—to do something about it. To not accept the status quo and to build a better healthcare system for the system’s customers: patients. 

“There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.” John F. Kennedy Jr.

In rank order, the five most-read 4sight Health commentaries from January through June are:

1. “Getting Urgent About Urgent Care: Health Systems Go Big on Retail”

David Johnson, 4sight Health’s founder and CEO, and Wyatt Ritchie, managing director at Cain Brothers, described the forces behind the urgent-care boom and how health systems can structure urgent-care partnerships to best serve their patients and their own business interests. The piece featured four brief case studies of health systems that have successfully used strategic partnerships to build their retail medicine market presence and withstand competition from well-financed rivals.

2.“Interoperability Battle Lines: Data Freedom Fighters vs. Entrenched Data Blockers”

Johnson called out EHR vendors for monopolistic business practices that have stalled interoperability to protect their profits by controlling the patient information captured by their EHRs. “Health data, like all data, must flow freely and easily to generate the greatest benefit,” he said. “Addressing the market failures embedded in current EHR practices requires pro-market regulatory intervention that makes healthcare data readily available to third parties.”

3. “Forced Resignations at NCH Healthcare System Expose Medicine’s Dark Side”

Johnson recounted an administration-medical staff dispute at a prominent Florida health system that resulted in the departure of the system’s long-tenured and successful CEO. It’s a story about how innovative care models can threaten those who’ve make a comfortable living off the status quo and the extent to which they’ll go to deliver care the way they’ve always done it. The story served as a warning to other hospital and health system leaders who need to weigh their careers against making the changes needed to make care better, more accessible and more affordable for patients.

4. “An Unbearable Burden: Paying for Commercial Health Insurance”

Johnson announced the results of 4sight Health’s latest Healthcare Affordability Index and quantified what everyone knows to be true: healthcare is becoming less and less affordable for even those with private health insurance. The index is the ratio of the total cost of family health insurance coverage to median household income. The index hit a record high of 31.5 percent last year. Johnson followed up the post with “An Unbearable Burden (Part 2): Wide Variations in State Health Insurance Costs,” which broke out the index by state.

5. “Everyone Knows What’s Going to Happen in Healthcare in 2019. Do you?”

David Burda, 4sight Health’s news editor and columnist, curated what healthcare revolutionaries should know from 21 sets of 2019 industry predictions from leading healthcare organizations, experts, pundits, vendors, analysts, though leaders, journalists, publications and think tanks. Whether their predictions come true by the end of December is less important than the picture that the predictions collectively paint of an industry in dramatic transition. It’s an industry in dramatic transition because its customers are demanding more.

We encourage you to read our five most-read commentaries from the first six months of 2019 and join the thousands of healthcare leaders who are making outcomes matter, customers count and value rule.

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