In the medical field, there are various ways to charge medical services. One approach is to use the bundled medical payment system. As its name suggests, bundled medical payments take a group of services and give patients a single charge for all of them. There are certain advantages, as well as downsides, that come with medical industries using bundled medical payments.
Advantages of Bundled Medical Payments
To start, when you bundle your medical payments together, providers are given more of an incentive to lower their costs, such as by preventing complications that can be avoided. Another perk of bundled medical payments is that they encourage many different providers and facilities to collaborate with one another, along with the creation of care pathways which abide by evidence-based guidelines.
Bundled medical payments can also be beneficial from an economic standpoint. By bundling services together, they can be seen more like a marketable “product”. This lets medical facilities more accurately predict the price of patient care.
Potential Issues With Bundled Medical Payments
While there are advantages to bundled medical payments, they do also come with their downsides. To start, defining and tracking what kind of care should be included in a bundle becomes tricky. As an example, if a patient is being treated for a hip replacement, but there are also chronic conditions that can be affected in the process, it becomes unclear whether or not a bundle should cover the costs of the latter issues. In other words, medical professionals may try shifting their expenses onto others.
Second, there can be limitations placed on care coordination. This is because there may be specialists who only want to care for patients’ conditions that are included within their personal bundle. If a patient has health conditions that aren’t included in their bundle, those specialists might not feel responsible for providing care, which can harm the quality of care that patients receive.
Finally, there’s the chance that medical facilities will favor working with patients who have less complicated medical conditions. This is because specialists won’t have to worry about providing care for conditions that aren’t included in their bundles.
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