Healthcare costs have been rising faster than inflation and even faster than college tuition. At the same time the quality of health care in the U.S. has been uneven at best. Many look to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as an opportunity for information technology and other innovative approaches to improve both the efficiency and quality of health services.
What are the key elements of this transformation? What’s working? What are some significant barriers?
To explore for answers, Dan Beyers, founding editor of Capital Business, the Washington Post's weekly local business newspaper, recently moderated a series of conversations with experts from the University of Maryland and the health management consultancy firm Evolent Health, Inc.
The panelists are:
- Ritu Agarwal, founder and director of the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems and Professor and the Dean’s Chair of Information Systems at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business
- Karoline Mortensen, assistant professor of health services administration, University of Maryland Public Health
- Shandy Guharoy (MBA ’13), vice president for information technology for Evolent Health
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its immediate effects are addressed in this first of three podcast installments.
Mortensen overviews the fundamentals of the ACA and some early, associated successes. Agarwal describes why digital technologies are essential for health care transformation and how they fit into the ACA scheme. Guharoy describes how hospital administrators are responding and adapting to the demand for more cost-efficient and effective patient-centered care.
LISTEN TO PODCAST, Part 1:
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About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business
The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and flex MBA, executive MBA, online MBA, business master’s, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations in North America and Asia.